From: Daniel DeLorme Date: 2007-10-12T18:23:13+09:00 Subject: Re: Inter-Process Messaging Francis Cianfrocca wrote: > What no one has yet asked you is: what kind of data do you have to pass > between this fork-parent and child, and by what protocol? > > Are they simple commands and responses (as in HTTP)? Is there a > state-machine (as in SMTP)? Or is the data-transfer full-duplex without a > protocol? Keeping in mind that this project is mainly intended as a learning experience, my specific idea is a http server architecture with generalist and specialist worker processes. The dispatcher would partition requests to generalists (as in HTTP) who in turn might dispatch to specialists (as in SMTP) for particular sub-tasks. Simple example: 100 requests for a thumbnail come at the same time, are split among N generalist workers, each of which asks the thumbnail specialist process to generate the thumbnail. The specialist catches the 100 simultaneous requests, generates the thumbnail *once* and sends the result back to the N generalists, who render it. > Are the data-flows extremely large? Exactly what are your performance > requirements? Good questions, but ultimately my true purpose is to educate myself about parallel processing; that's the only requirement I have. So while I'd say data-flows are unlikely to be large in this case, I'd still like to how to handle large data-flows. Hmmm, any good books to recommend?