[ic] Rpc traffic mode

[Mike Heins]

Quoting interch (interch@valley-internet.com):
> 
> Before I go putting much time into debugging the problems we have had
> running in rpc mode, I was curious as to how high a priority maintaining
> that part of the code is to the developers?

That is a very high priority, as many of the large customers of the
various IC consultants run in that mode due to heavy site traffic.

> Here is my situation.  Over the last year and a half, I have run the latest
> stable release of IC in rpc mode on both Redhat and Freebsd, using several
> versions of perl (5.005, 5.6, and now 5.8) on both platforms, and can
> consistantly cause Interchange to hang (kill -TERM won't stop it, I have to
> send it a -KILL).  Usually it hangs when it is restarted after adding a new
> catalog, but sometimes it will just hang randomly.

Wait just a minute. What is MaxServers set to? Try 0 and see what
happens.

Interchange runs in PreFork mode on sites handling many, many, page
views a day. It does work. There are bugs, of course, and we keep
fixing them. There is a Neilsen top 20 commerce site running on IC,
and they have run across them from time to time. Most would not 
cause any sort of hang.

I wouldn't bet on it working reliably on BSD implementations. BSD
and Perl daemons don't get along very well, and never really have. In
the past, broken perl implementations were sent out with FreeBSD, too. I
don't know what the current state is, I just know that most of the
historic high-traffic problems of IC are on BSD. And that BSD leads
by far in the number of core-dumping bugs that have shown up in
Perl for any mainstream OS.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike@perusion.com>

Friends don't let friends use Outlook. -- Bob Blaylock