Daniel, AFAIK, "mutex" refers to mutual exclusion. It is commonly referred to in relation to multi-threading but can apply to an inter-process scheme too. I would assume that only one thread of one (child) process can access a given resource at a given time, but you should refer to the documentation of any code you use for those specifics. I'm sorry, but I don't have any personal experience with mutex and the APR libs.
Are you talking about adjusting your Apache child/thread setup for development or are you targeting your module to only Apache installations with specific configuration (i.e. single-thread mode)? If you are worried about the size of a child process' server_config_struct, you could just program it to take a lot of room in the server_config_struct and recommend that Apache be configured for only one child-process. I would recommend against it, but it doesn't seem like a terrible idea. There will probably be significant performance hits on certain OSes/Apache-deployments (*NIX) and less on others (likely WinNT since I believe it defaults to a single-child process with a large thread-count). Also, what are you using this giant list of URIs for? There may be a more efficient way of distributing the processing load (and, therefore, speeding up the overall Apache response time). If I read your first post to this list correctly, you are using a table (as in apr_table_*, a DB table, or other?) with a large number of URLs. You aren't walking through a sequential list of URLs in apr_tables are you? Are the "URI"s you're storing full URIs, domain names, or MXs? Perhaps you could use some help with your overall design of the module (or maybe there's an existing module that does what you want). Regards, Dave -- David Wortham Senior Web Applications Developer Unspam Technologies, Inc. 1901 Prospector Dr. #30 Park City, UT 84060 (435) 513-0672 On 3/23/07, Danie Qian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Dave, I think you are right after piecing together all the information I gathered from various places. As soon as a child process modify the data in the server config created by the parent server, the child gets a copy of it. This is ok if the server config is only a few httpd.conf directives but in my case it would be very inefficient as the table to be put in server config can grow to a few hundred Kilobytes. At this point child processes arent required to dynamically change anything in the server config but I dont feel comfortable to put in it being aware of the above fact. Someone in the forum mentioned about mutex for this situaction. Now i have one question: mutex is a multithread thing but if I run apache in single-thread mode like prefork is it still the best solution? Thanks, Daniel
