On 10/03/2008 10:55 PM, Tim Bray wrote: > On Oct 3, 2008, at 1:16 PM, Ruediger Pluem wrote: > >> This maybe because the default locking mechanism on OS X is different >> from the >> one on Solaris. AFAICR Solaris has fcntl as default mechanism. >> The question is: Why do you create this file beforehand? If a file >> needs to be >> created apr_global_mutex_create will do this for you. > > Good question. Let me present the problem at a high level. There's a > file that is regularly refreshed, and I only want one request handler > rebuilding it at a time, because otherwise there are lots of horrible > race conditions. I don't know whether I'm in worker or prefork mode. > So I simply want to serialize update of this file, and I thought > apr_global_mutex_* was a good way to do this. Is there a better way? -Tim
It seems that you have found the correct way. It is just that the file you want to refresh from one request handler and the file that is eventually used for locking are two different things. Using the default method it is not even clear if the filename is used depending on the platform you use. So consider the filename as some sort of abstract name for your lock that needs to be known to use the same lock in a different process. But I am no expert on this and as Bill mentioned in the other mail the APR API might lack the needed operations, if there is no parent / child relationship between them. As you seem to work inside httpd I think you should use the post_config hook to create the global mutex and the child_init hook to reattach to this lock in each child via apr_global_mutex_child_init Regards Rüdiger
