From: Ezra Zygmuntowicz <ezmobius@...>
Date: 2006-09-24T13:28:29+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] slave-0.2.0


On Sep 23, 2006, at 3:52 PM, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

>
> SYNOPSIS
>
>   the Slave class forks a process and starts a drb server in the  
> child using
>   any object as the server.  the process is detached so it is not  
> required
>   (nor possible) to wait on the child pid.  a Heartbeat is set up  
> between the
>   parent and child processes so that the child will exit of the  
> parent exits
>   for any reason - preventing orphaned slaves from running  
> indefinitely.  the
>   purpose of Slaves is to be able to easily set up a collection of  
> objects
>   communicating via drb protocols instead of having to use IPC.
>
> <snip>
>
> -a


	This is a great library Ara, I am writing a library that wraps up  
the slave lib into another interface for controlling jobs with timers  
and a few other things. So the master process holds a thread pool  
with references to slave classes in it so that you can set a limit on  
the number of running slaves. Using it to offload jobs from a rails  
app to not hold up the http flow. I have a question though. What  
would be the cleanest way to have a slave class signal that it is  
finished working and needs to be kill'ed. I know there is the  
shutdown method that you could call from the master process to  
shutdown a slave. But is there something similar that can be called  
from a slave process? Or should I just let the slave process exit!  
and let the heartbeat cleanup after the dead slaves?

Thanks
-Ezra