On Monday, 31 October 2011 22:28:32 E R wrote:
> To reduce the impact this checking would have on serving requests I
> was thinking of checking only every N requests (i.e. N = 10) and/or
> performing the check as part of the cleanup handler.
I wouldn't do that. Suppose your server is under load so that N workers
are needed. Then the load drops so that M workers are needed where M<<N.
Depending on your config N-M workers may linger on for quite a while not
getting any request. Now you change the config. If you check only every X
request cycles for an update the new config may take a long time to make
it to all the workers.
> Any suggestions / recommendations or alternatives for a mod-perl
> environment?
Have a look at MMapDB on CPAN. It maps a (prepared binary) file read-only
into RAM. Thus, the memory is shared among all of it's clients. Access is
similar to hash/array lookup in Perl. Updates replace the whole file and
set a flag in the header of the old file that may still be mapped by a
number of clients marking the DB as invalid. Checking if there is new
config is hence a simple RAM lookup, no syscall or similar. Only if the
flag indicates the currently mapped DB is out-dated further steps are
taken to map the new one. The DB file itself is organized to allow for
binary search. So, lookup is quite fast. If you store larger chunks of
data another feature comes in handy. Upon access data is not copied. What
you get is a read-only variable (a PV) that points directly to the shared
memory. If you pass around references in your program then this value
will never be copied. There is one more thing, the DB stores also the
utf8 flag for its data. So, the strings C<do{use bytes; "förtsch"}> and
C<do{use utf8; "förtsch"}> are stored as 2 different things and you get
them out as such.
Torsten Förtsch
--
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