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

[Hal Rottenberg]

Right.  And if that is too expensive, you can use software load
balancing (such as Windows NLB /WLBS).  I think using XMPP for this
would be unwise.

On 2/13/06, Paul Clegg <paulclegg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >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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