Hello list.
Having looked hi and lo for definite information on the subject, found a lot but a bit confusing...
Environment : Apache 2 / mod_perl 2 / perl 5.8.4+ Windows and Unix(es) Apache mod_perl2 Handlers
The basic question is : does there exist a platform-independent way for a bunch of apache2/mod_perl2 handlers to share information that would be stored in some single shared memory area, assuming part of the thus-shared information changes from time to time ?
More details : My application is a document storage and retrieval system, where documents are stored in some filing structure on disk, and identified by an "abstract" document-id. This document-id can be translated back to a path by an algorithm based on information stored in a couple of simple tables. Most Handlers are retrieval agents serving document requests from browsers, for which they need access to the table information, to translate a URI-contained document-id, to a real path. The contents of the tables can change from time to time, because new documents are filed into the structure by ongoing filing processes. At the moment, the table information is stored in disk files, and each retrieval or filing process accesses it by flock-ing a "semaphore" file, reading the data, possibly updating the tables, then unlocking the semaphore file. I would like to replace this by tables held in memory and some access synchronisation mechanism between the various "child" or "thread" processes involved.
At the moment, considering all the information I have found, the only methods that come to mind as being safe and relatively simple, would be 1) to create a separate daemon process acting as the "keeper of the shared tables", to whom the various Handler agents would talk via a TCP (or UDP) socket. or 2) to do this via DB or something similar (the tables are not that large, but I dislike this solution for various reasons)
But are these really the only methods ?
Thank you in advance. André Warnier
