[OT] Perl daemons (was Re: Excellent article on Apache/mod_perl at eToys)

[cl...@metadot.com]

>
> Is anyone else using independent perl processes in a web app, or have strong
> reasons not to?

Our web application (Metadot) provides a number of functions that are fulfilled by
a daemon written in perl. Among these are: collecting content from syndicated news
channels, sending email messages to users about newly added content, retrieving
email messages to add to site content, monitoring and cleaning database tables,
etc.

We run this daemon as a cron job every twenty minutes, and within it we have
sections for tasks that are performed at hourly, daily and weekly intervals.

The script is a bit messy but could still serve as a skeleton for similar ones for
other applications. It's called metadotd.pl and is part of our open source
distribution available from Metadot.net.

Regards,

Claudio

Re: [OT] Perl daemons (was Re: Excellent article on Apache/mod_p

[Michael <mi...@bizsystems.com>]

> >> Is anyone else using independent perl processes in a web app, or have strong
> >> reasons not to?
> 
> I use them for quite a few things. fork/exec works nicely in perl
> (on unix at least), allows me to write daemons for most things.
> 

Sure, our network is supported internally by a DNS daemon written 
entirely in perl which supports all standard TCP/UDP queries, 
frontended inside by an extensive  web app interface and backended by 
a sql server to store the data. It does all the normal daemon 
stuff, forking and keeping track of it's kids, etc... What appears to 
be the primary NS's at our site actually query the inside DNS for 
their updates. Modifications to the NSDB via the web interface are 
pushed out to the primaries in real time within a few seconds. This 
has been running for several years, never even a hiccup.

There are a multitude of other daemon and daemon like processes that 
support automatic updates for a variety of speciality web sites that 
reside on our servers. many of these processes are spread across 
multiple machines, each doing their little piece to complete the 
puzzle -- all written in perl for the stand-alones or mod_perl for 
the web apps.

Michael
Michael@Insulin-Pumpers.org

Re: [OT] Perl daemons (was Re: Excellent article on Apache/mod_perl at eToys)

[le...@wrkhors.com]

-- claudio@metadot.com on 10/23/01 10:23:18 -0500

>> 
>> Is anyone else using independent perl processes in a web app, or have strong
>> reasons not to?

I use them for quite a few things. fork/exec works nicely in perl
(on unix at least), allows me to write daemons for most things.

Why do you ask?

sl