Dan,
Sounds like you're moving into the realms of threads. Perl 5.8.0 has stable
threading support. Install it and type 'perldoc perlthrtut' for details. If
you take a threaded approach to solving this problem, you'll probably have
a main thread of execution that launches seperate threads for each
connection using blocking sockets for network IO. And then you'll have an
additional thread that responds to events. An event can be generated by
some network traffic from a user or a timer expiring (as in your example).
Then you'll have a seperate thread that loops through your data structures
checking if timers have expired and sending the appropriate events to your
event handler.
Something like that. The other approach which will give you MUCH better
performance, but will be more complicated to code, is to use non-blocking
sockets for your network IO and to just code your application as one big
loop that continually checks for network traffic and then quickly loops
through your data strucutures to see if any events need handling.
Non-blocking sockets are kindof complex to code, but they give you much
better performance than blocking sockets because you dont have the overhead
of managing multiple threads of execution.
Just FYI, blocking sockets are sockets that pause the execution of your
application until an event occurs on the socket like data arrives to be
read. They're a real pain if you're trying to handle multiple sockets in a
single thread of execution, because when you try to read from the socket,
everything freezes until you have succesfully read. non-blocking sockets
dont halt execution - they just give you a status saying 'I would have
blocked' and you can continue doing other stuff while periodically checking
back to see if the thing you're waiting for has happened yet.
I know I seem to be digressing here from your original question, but I
think your question is really 'how do I handle time critical network events
while doing lots of other less important stuff concurrently?'.
~mark.
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 02:53:11PM +0100, dan wrote:
> I'm writing IRC services in perl (some say it's a bad idea, others good, I
> personally don't care what the language is, it has a fast response time and
> does what I want it to do), however I need to have a sub to check bans every
> second, to see if it should time them out and remove them. I have the time
> to expire it in unix timestamp seconds:
> $akill{$host}->{expires}
> I need to make a sub to run through all the %akill keys one by one every
> second to check if it should time them out. However I need it so the timer
> doesn't interfere with the rest of the code, i.e responding to users on the
> network normally as if the timer isn't even working.
>
> Any clues?
>
> Dan
>
>
>
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