[jdev] Using chat room as resource pool -- need advice

[Paul Clegg]

>From your description, it seems that a hardware load balancer in front of
your web service farm would do this job easily and transparently.

-Paul

On 2/13/06, Matthew Wilson <mw44106 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We have a bunch of boxes (20 or so) that offer web-services to our
> server farm of several hundred boxes.  Right now, if a box on a farm
> needs to connect to one of the web service boxes, it iterates through
> a list of all the web-service boxes, and tries to connect to each one,
> until it finds one that is free to handle the request.
>
> I'm thinking that a better model might be to create a MUC where each
> of the web-service boxes are persistently connected.  They would use
> their presence attribute to indicate whether they are available or
> busy.
>
> When one of the farm boxes needs to make a request, it would connect
> to the chat, get the presence info for all the web-service boxes, and
> then choose one of the available servers to send a request to.
>
> In order to send the request, I figured the client could send a
> message to the room and specify in the message which server process it
> is sending the request to.
>
> At this point, the server would
> * update its presence to busy;
> * handle the request;
> * put a message back into the chat room, with the request results;
> * update its presence to available
>
> I'd prefer that the clients and servers communicate through the room,
> rather than directly, so that I can just log the chat room and see all
> the transactions.
>
> A few questions:
> * Is this asinine?
> * Has anyone done anything like this?  Are there any hidden gotchas
> you discovered?
>   * Is there any reason to mix in some jabber-RPC?
>
> All advice is appreciated.
>
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