On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Norman Barker <[email protected]> wrote: > Paul, > > for us, the process management is critical, we have external process > code and due to this process code size and age it is possible that it > may crash (this is not that unusual!), so I am +1 on process > management and am interested in helping. >
Yeah, Mikeal's first concern when I mentioned replacing _externals was having the process management so that we can keep the dead simple slave process semantics. In talking with him we realized that this would provide a dead simple way to hook up a node.js handler as well, so I think the idea has legs. > As for reverse proxy is this going to be inside couch (well inside > mochiweb) or a process in front of couch and external processes? > > This will add the capability for streaming results from external > processes so I am +1. > The current plan is to make it inside couch using mochiweb and ibrowse. I know that Benoît had patches land in the recent ibrowse release for similar reasons so we should be ready to go on those fronts. > Norman > > > > On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Paul Davis > <[email protected]> wrote: >> At CouchCamp there was a bit of discussion on replacing the _external >> API with something a bit more modern to give _external processes more >> control over their environment. >> >> The idea was born out of a discussion with Robert Newson who mentioned >> that couchdb-lucene really only needs a reverse proxy to put itself in >> the same URL namespace. It occurred to us that having a reverse proxy >> instead of the current _external stdio protocol would allow lots of >> other interesting features like node.js integration, as well as allow >> implementors to handle requests in parallel and so on and such forth. >> >> The major drawback that was identified was that if we switched to just >> a reverse proxy, people would then be responsible for handling the >> process management of their _external handlers. Ie, they'd have to >> configure daemon monitoring to make sure the processes stayed up and >> what not. The solution we came up with was to include another feature >> that did process management. Ie, something that would bring up an OS >> process when the server booted, and respawn it if it crashed. There'd >> be no connection to the _externals. Other than the basic "just keep a >> process up" sort of behaviour, the only other thing I could see adding >> is a simple stdio protocol to get configuration values from CouchDB. >> Other people have expressed interest in just the process management >> functionality as well which makes me think that having the two new >> features to replace the _external API would be both easier on >> developers as well as providing more functionality. >> >> So now I'm looking for feedback on what other people might think of >> this. I'll start working on this fairly soon if I don't hear any major >> objections. >> >> HTH, >> Paul Davis >> >
