[E-Lang] remote comms: Timeouts and Connection Failure

[Tyler Close]

At 10:28 AM 4/6/01 -0700, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>At 07:44 AM Friday 4/6/01, Tyler Close wrote:
> >At 02:02 PM 4/6/01 +0100, Tyler Close wrote:
> >>I'd recommend that you make a simple implementation of the Acid 
> interface and implement E to the Acid interface.
> >
> >I've been thinking through what a simple implementation of the Acid
> >interface might look like and have decided its pretty easy. If you'll 
> commit
> >to building the E to Acid interface, I'll make a cheesy "save-the-world"
> >implementation of Acid and put it under the Mozilla license.
>
>I find this offer very encouraging, thanks!!  I cannot quite make the
>commitment you ask for because of the potential for mismatch problems I
>can't foresee (I know of none presently).  But if I commit to trying, and to
>publicly discussing any apparent roadblocks, would that be good enough for a
>deal?

Since you seem so thin on time lately, I think I'd need some sort of 
guaranteed minimum expenditure of MarkM hours.


>Regarding the previous issue, since you'd now be doing the cheezy
>persistence implementation, not I, do you expect it could checkpoint often
>enough that its users could reasonably delay outgoing messages until the
>next checkpoint?  If not, how do you expect users of cheezy-Acid persistence
>to cope, if not by amnesia?

For the implementation I have in mind, one in N checkpoints would be an 
"all BLOBs" checkpoint, whose runtime would obviously be linear with the 
number of BLOBs in the Vat. All checkpoints N - 1 would only write out the 
diff to the previous checkpoint and so should be just as fast as in Lock.

So, you could forget about amnesia if you're willing to suffer block-up 
once every N. We could try to put some thought into how to schedule this 
Nth checkpoint so that it was as palatable as possible. Maybe N is of 
variable length and is only done if the Vat has been idle for some preset 
amount of time.


>In any case, this offer makes me very hopeful.  On to persistence!!

Not so fast buster, lets finish up collections first! ;)

Something done is progress. Something half done is not.

Tyler