many services, one dispatcher

httpd dispatcher for services

[kmufasa]

Hello all,

I saw this thread on another board. It is exactly like my problem:

[stackoverflow.com...]

PROBLEM:

The problem is that our backend code is not thread safe therefore I will need to run a separate process on Solaris .... However, for performance reasons I cannot start and finish process for every request from the GUI.

This design means that I need to take care of several problems:

there must be a single point of contact for the GUI code,

the communication must happen with the instance started during first call (it should either be routed or the first call should return address of the actual server instance),

there must be some keep-alive messages sent between GUI and server process to manage lifetime of server process (server process cannot run forever).

QUESTION:

Could you recommend a framework that would take care of these details (message routing/dispatching and lifetime management)?

RESPONSE:

You could technically configure Apache httpd to spawn a new instance per connection. The configuration also allows you to manage the time the processes stay alive when idle, and how many processes to leave running at a minimum. This would work well as long as the web service is stateless. A little weird, but technically feasible

I just thought about it, and you could probably use HTTP 1.1 keep-alives to manage the life of the process too. Apache lets you configure how long it will allow the keep-alive to remain open, which keeps the thread/process for the connection active

MY QUESTION: How do I do the items marked in bold?

Any help, hints or advice would be greatly appreciated :-)

Regards, Casey