[Melbourne-pm] Testing fork

Joshua Goodall joshua at roughtrade.net
Tue Aug 24 18:18:24 CDT 2004


On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 07:56:58PM +1000, David Dick wrote:
> 2) The horrifying mutations that this code can be subjected to.  For 
> example, i'm writing the code as a cgi script to maximise portability. 
> For speed, the code be run using Apache::Registry.  Which, among other 
> things silently overrides the exit statement, unless you fully qualify 
> as CORE::exit.  I'm damned if i know how, even if i know and expect the 
> weird environmental conditions, that i can test that my code is correct 
> in an environment such as Apache::Registry;
> 
> 3) probably a whole lot of other issues that i'm not aware of yet.

I'm used to Apache killing off children that run for too long.

Why don't you write a real daemon instead?  Your CGI can then just connect
to it, give it the appropriate parameters, then leave it to work.  Give
it a couple of methods more for retrieving status/results, and then the
CGIs are just presentation wrappers for the API your daemon presents.
I suggest having it listen on a UNIX socket in /var/run/<packagename>

Three advantages:

i) The daemon can manage the workload queues e.g. a separate processing
   thread/child process per CPU,
ii) You've decoupled the logic from the interface, so you can use it from
    more than just a CGI (e.g. you can monitor current workload from
    a command-line tool)
iii) You've separated the permissions between the presentation layer
     and the logic layer.  This is excellent for sidestepping a whole
     raft of security issues.

Don't forget; to properly daemonise, reopen file descriptors 0,1,2
to /dev/null (don't just close them - it can cause problems if you
exec subprocesses that expect them to be stdin/out/err), call setsid
(to create a new session, a new process group, and remove references
to any controlling terminal), and talk to syslog.  There's a wrapper
in CPAN for all that, but I forget the name.

J


-- 
Joshua Goodall                           "as modern as tomorrow afternoon"
joshua at roughtrade.net                                       - FW109
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