[ST-users] shared data

[Neil C. <nc...@kl...>]

Hi all,

I have an application I'm designing that may or may not be suitable for
use with ST.

The application should be able to handle a fair number (128-1024) of
concurrent TCP connections. Of these, half will be inbound and half will
be outbound (there is always a 1:1 relationship between inbound and
outbound connections).

It won't need to do a lot of processing on the data that comes in; most
of the time it will just be copying data from the inbound socket to the
outbound socket, and vice versa.

It will need very rapid access (i.e. as scaleable & fast as possible) to
a single shared data structure (this is a cache: the whole point of this
is to get a lot of cache hits, so I'd like all the threads to be able to
access a single cache). There is a single unique value for each unique
key, so the cache could be implemented as a hash table.

This application will also need to be able to scale with the number of
CPUs in the machine: simply using a single CPU is not optimal.

Is this a good candidate for using ST? AFAIK, it is considered good
practice with ST to create several processes to allow for system
scalability. This would work well, but wouldn't IPC be a significant
performance hit? I'll be doing several operations on the hash table for
each connection; furthermore, an operation might need to insert or
retrieve a relatively large amount of data from the table (10 to 100
KB).

I would be grateful for any advice on how to design my application to
work with ST -- or, if ST isn't an appropriate choice, the best I/O
design to use.

Thanks in advance,

Neil

-- 
Neil Conway <nei...@ro...>
PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC