Re: no more ipc channels

From: Dirk Koopman (terhi.victor@logonet.com)
Date: Mon Jan 03 2000 - 13:30:05 EET

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    On a heartfelt personal note, can I say that IPC message channels are one of
    the hardest (read nastiest) programming things to get absolutely correct in
    all circumstances.

    I once wrote a very nice commercial spooler using them and although it works
    very well, under the miriad fault conditions with client programs dying or
    programmers using the api not closing their end properly etc, the small
    buffer size and impossibility of knowing whether a asyncronous process (not
    in your process group) has gone away without checking all the time means that
    this sort of problem happens a lot.

    Some time this year it will be converted to sockets and select.

    On the other hand using a small 4 byte IPC shared memory segment provided the
    easiest way to keep an absolutely reliable handle on how many people are using
    something concurrently... (Hint: don't use the memory area for anything at
    all...)

    On 03-Jan-2000 Tomi Manninen OH2BNS wrote:
    > I seem to have vague recollection that clx has had problems with IPC
    > channels as well. I'm not sure however as I don't run it my self.
    >

    Dirk G1TLH

    -- 
    Dirk-Jan Koopman, Tobit Computer Co Ltd 
    At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find
    at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
    



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