Hi Ron. I found the following trying to follow up a bit on what you have suggested. I believe it is similar to what you are doing from your explanation. It may be out of date. I have not attempted to daemonize a process to date so it would be great if you could look at this and comment since I need something to work with. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-February/030814.html As far as interacting with Zope, I have done something similar to build a site remotely from another server but setup https and sent credentials in the urls. I wonder if there is a way to inject them into Zope another way since the daemon is on the machine. I think the ClockServer injects requests into Zope. I believe it is something similar since credentials still need to be in url to execute something but requests are not exposed to the web doing this. Regards, David On Wednesday, September 14, 2005, at 12:11 AM, Ron Bickers wrote:
On Tue September 13 2005 08:16 pm, David Pratt wrote:
How is it that you send a signal to the long running process?
The long-running process writes a pid file and waits for a SIGUSR1 signal (using Python's signal module). A small External Method, called when the user submits the form, reads the pid file and sends the signal to the process.
Is the long running process cronned to look for a record in the database or is this starting another server of some type.
It waits for a SIGUSR1 signal from the website, otherwise it's idle. That way it can begin processing immediately but doesn't have to do any periodic checking. I do, however, have a cron job that starts it every 15 minutes in case it dies. The process knows if it's already running, so it's safe to just start it regularly.
What I need is something like what you are suggesting - wakes up when there is work in the hopper and chugs along until it is done and then goes to sleep (sort of the way a printing queue works). At the same time it would be great if it was something that had a small RAM footprint or ran without consuming any more than X mbs.
The part that waits for the signal is very small, but it loads the Reportlab modules and reads a bunch of data to do the work, so it can get large at times. If it were to just call an external program that dies after doing its work, you could easily keep memory usage low.
The other problem I have with this is that it needs to do work in Zope itself since the final docs end up as objects. I have just found Chris Wither's product called Stepper. I am not sure it this is for this type of situation or more for cronned maintenance.
I have no idea. Maybe it'll do what you want, but I don't understand what it really does just from the description. The work I needed to do was external to Zope anyway (reading data from a MySQL database, building PDFs with Reportlab, sending email), so it's actually better that I'm outside of it.
When I have to run things in Zope from outside, I run curl with a URL of a Python Script that does the work. It's a hack, but I've never had a problem with it. I'm not sure how else you would work in Zope from a process outside of Zope.
-- Ron