Guys, I need help with an algorithm. I'm writing a program that sends a repeated pattern of requests to a service. Each request has a "weight" that controls the relative frequency with which I need to send that particular request. So given:
foo => 1 bar => 3 I would send four requests, one of which is a 'foo', and the other three are 'bar'. So my requests would look like: foo, bar, bar, bar, foo, bar, bar, bar, ... If I have a case like: foo => 1 bar => 1 qux => 6 I can easily send one foo, followed by a bar, followed by 6 qux: foo bar qux qux qux qux qux qux However, what I need to do is to distribute the requests so that the intervals between instances of a given request are distributed as equally as possible. For example: foo qux qux qux bar qux qux qux Now I have only intervals of 0 or 1 between successive "qux", instead of an interval of 2 as in the previous case. As an extreme example, if I had a dozen requests with a weight of 1 and a final request with a weight of 12, I would "starve" the highly-weighted request until the first 12 had been sent. How can I generalize this for any given set of requests and weights? Is anyone aware of any general literature on this kind of problem? (Sounds like a scheduling algorithm maybe?) Thanks, Bob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
