Re: [GENERAL] fork() bad

Hi, Herouth.

On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Herouth Maoz wrote:

|o| > As some of you may know, I'm hacking Ascend RADIUS 2.01 to look up a
|o| > PostgreSQL database for authentication and log to PG for accounting.
|o| > Normally, RADIUS fork()s once for Accounting and fork()s for each
|o| > Authentication request. That's a lot of fork()ing and establishing
|o| > connections to the backend. It's slow, but it's better than junking
|o| > whatever code I've written so far.
|o| >
|o| > If anyone can give a better suggestion, I'm all ears. Also, if anyone
|o| > wants the code when it's done, try asking. ;^)
|o|
|o| Why don't you try to synchronize access to the connection between the
|o| various processes? You know, lock it in an exclusive lock, on an
|o| inter-process basis, such that when one process accesses it, the others
|o| have to wait. Or you can have a few connections open, so that the
|o| bottleneck is wider. You know, like you would treat any shared object in an
|o| inter-process environment?

It kinda defeats the purpose of allowing RADIUS to fork() if I do locking.
I've no benchmarks to prove it, but if I allow it to execute one process
at a time via locking, that would probably slow the other processes down.
(ie. Should the waiting process block? If so, when will it try again? Are
the overheads to establishin a connection really that big?)


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