From: Lennon Day-Reynolds <rcoder@...>
Date: 2004-09-14T01:59:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Issue with drb....

Chris,

There are quite a few reasons this could be going wrong, both inside
and outside of your Ruby test harness. Since you said that the problem
was only reproducible on long (>1hr.) tests, though, I would suspect
socket connection (or other system-level resource) timeouts.

I would suggest adding a 'ping()' method to your DRb server, and then
having clients call it periodically (say, every 5-10 seconds) in a
background thread or process, as well as optionally before any call
with important data to be transferred. That way, both the client and
the server can detect connection failures before you have to worry
about losing data.

DRb is cheap wire-level scaffolding, but it's not a reliable messaging
system; that has to be handled at the application level.

-- 
Lennon
rcoder.net