process pools? (for gen_servers)

[Pascal Brisset]

Julian Assange writes:
 > The context is persistant http connections. Tearing down the socket
 > and rebuilding it for each url would be dramatically slower.

We had plenty of similar problems, and we ended up writing a generic
'pool_server' process which masquerades as a gen_server and
load-balances requests to a pool of actual gen_servers.

Incidentally this pool_server is the right place to do things like
load regulation (keeping track of how many requests there are in each
server's queue), failover, static routing, retry-on-failure, etc.

A typical use is to multiplex SQL requests over several persistent
connections to a replicated database (switching to the secondary db
when all primary connections are dead, etc). In another context, the
load regulation stuff helps guarantee some kind of fairness among
several pool_servers which share the same workers.

-- Pascal Brisset <pascal.brisset@REDACTED> +33141986741 --
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