Re: Re: Sharing data structures among http processes?

[sutch]

You are correct, the shared memory structure is for performance reasons. It is for an application that I expect to be accessed often. The queries against the database are complex and will probably overload the database server so much that the required performance will not be met with a database alone.

Your GDBM idea sounds good enough, as long as the OS can be made to share the cache among all of the processes. Will the GDBM tied hash be automatically shared (through the OS), or does that need to be shared using shared memory? Or does this method require that each process have a separate tied hash?

[jbert]

The OS-level cacheing I mentioned was simply good old file-level cacheing. If your data store is held in files accessed through the file system (as is the case for simple databases like GDBM, flat file, etc) then often-used data is kept around in RAM - shared between processes.

You still need to spend some CPU cycles in doing lookups, etc but you don't spend any I/O - which is a win.

OK - so your back end data store is in a database which you wish to protect from the load which your hits are likely to generate. Do you know for certain this is going to be a problem? If not can you simulate some load to see?

Presumably you don't want to cache writes - you want them to go straight to the DB.

So you want a cacheing layer in front of your data which is shared amongst processes and invalidated correctly as data is written.

I don't know which DB you are using but I would imagine most/many would have such a cacheing layer. If this isn't possible or it doesn't stand up to your load then the route I would probably choose is to funnel all the DB access through one daemon process which can implement your cacheing strategy and hold one copy of the cached info.

But I wouldn't do that until it was clear that I couldn't scale my DB to meet my load or do something else...say regularly build read-only summaries of the complex queries.

I guess it all kind of depends on the specifics of your data structures...sorry to be vague. There is a good article describing a scaling-up operation at webtechniques which seems informative to me.