[erlang-questions] gen_server and multiple workers

[Paul Mineiro]

Hey David,

You could create multiple gen_servers and instead of registering
their pids (using start_link/4) instead keep them anonymous (using
start_link/3) and then have them joined a named process group (using
pg2:join/2) and then issue requests using pg2:get_closest_pid/1.

-- p

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, David King wrote:

> I imagine that this is a problem that has been solved a hundred times
> and that I just don't have the right search terms :)
>
> I need to communicate with an outside program, for which I'm using a
> port and a gen_server. However, I may be getting many requests for
> communication to this port at a time, and I don't want to introduce a
> bottleneck in the gen_server, nor do I want to fork() a new instance
> of the program for every request. So I think I'd like to have several
> workers, where each request grabs an available worker (blocking until
> one is available), ideally with some place to put logic to expand or
> reduce the size of the worker-pool with load, but that's optional.
> Having several copies of the external program open at a time isn't a
> problem (it's just a text-transform done by a Perl program).
>
> My gen_server doesn't keep any state except for the Port, so that
> could be managed another way. It seems that I can't combine this with
> gen_server, as gen_server seems to want to register() its PID, and I
> can't have multiple workers with the same register()ed name.
>
> I have a supervisor watching the gen_server. supervisor's required
> export init/1 returns (among other things) a list of processes to
> enter the supervision, but it just calls start_link on the
> gen_server, which registers its name.
>
> I could have the worker-pool managed by the single gen_server
> instance, but I'd like them to be able to crash independently, and it
> seems that that would complicate the handle_call function (as
> gen_server seems to assume that it's synchronous). Complication is
> okay, but I'd like to avoid it if it turns out that there is a single
> library that already does what I want :)
>
> I could also have the supervisor pass in a different name to register
> to gen_server:start_link (worker1,worker2, ...) and have the
> supervisor manage the pool, but that seems messy (which, again, is
> okay, but is to be avoided if possible).
>
> Anyway, I'm sure this is a solved problem and I'm just looking in the
> wrong places. How would you do this?
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