spread

[Serge Aleynikov]

Hi Dietmar,

I experimented with with the Spread/Erlang combination about a year ago. 
  At a time I wanted to evaluate if it were possible to get high 
availability of Erlang servers to C clients that communicated to servers 
using spread process groups.  Since spread offered a very simple 
asynchronous client API, it was very attractive to use that on the 
client side.

While the solution worked well with a reasonable throughput, I wouldn't 
consider Spread for prime-time production applications, as I've seen 
some issues with it recovering from network faults.  The spread client 
API library didn't detect well lost connections from the server.  If you 
go to the spread's mailing list you'll also see that once in a while 
people report some strange behavior of spread daemons.

However I wouldn't want to discourage you from using spread, as spread 
works well when network problems are not an issue, and may be suitable 
for your needs.

As a result of my experiments I ended up not using spread, and switching 
to "pure" Erlang architecture, as it did offer process groups, C API, 
and performed very well.

I sent the updated version of the spread driver for Erlang with some bug 
fixes to Scott, the author of the original library.  As he was quite 
busy I'm not sure if he got a chance to update the jungerl repository. 
If needed I can share that version.

Regards,

Serge

Dietmar Schaefer wrote:
> Hi !
> 
> 
> I just found spread   www.spread.org.
> 
> The site mentioned Erlang Driver Toolkit Spread driver 
> <http://www.snookles.com/erlang/edtk/edtk-1.0/doc/FAQ.html#whatexamples> 
> and
> Example code 
> <http://www.snookles.com/erlang/edtk/edtk-1.0/examples/spread/> is 
> available.
> 
> 
> Does someone knows more about it ???
> 
> 
> 
> regards
> 
> 
> Dietmar
>