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< Open Telecom Platform (OTP) ~ Supervision tree spawning gen_servers on remote nodes? |
| lflemmer |
 Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 12:24 am |
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Joined: 04 Nov 2007
Posts: 1
Location: New York
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I am new to OTP programming, and I am trying to understand the appropriate idiom for what seems like a common task.
I want to create a system to do distributed computation, i.e. I will have worker processes running on nodes on different hosts. I want to bring up all these various processes at the same time, and have them be robust (restart if they fail etc).
My first inclination is to create a supervision tree, in which each of the distributed nodes is a gen_server. However, it is not clear to me how to do this while staying within the common pattern of the gen_server behaviour. gen_server:start_link/4 doesn't do it, since I have no way to specify that the MFA should spawn on a remote node. I could achieve what I want if gen_server exposed a spawn_link function, but it doesn't.
Obviously I can roll my own management of the distributed nodes using the BIFs, but I was hoping to do it within the OTP paradigm.
Any pointers on how to achieve this, or an explanation of what a more appropiate OTP idiom is would be much appreciated. |
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| admin |
| Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:20 am |
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Site Admin
Joined: 28 Jun 2006
Posts: 108
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What you want to do is have a supervisor on the remote node which supervises the child locally. If node A needs a child started on node B, send a message to a process on node B which will do it for you. This can easily be done with the supervisor:start_child/2 call, where the first argument to the function might be a supervisor on a remote node.
In large distributed systems, your biggest enemy will be the network and firewalls, which will create occasional blips. Linking processes across nodes is not advised.
Hope this helps,
Francesco
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http://www.erlang-consulting.com |
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