Have you ever gone out into the workshop to make something interesting, only to find that the workbench you want to use is too short or long or not high enough? Or maybe it doesn’t have clamps in the right places or it’s just too uneven? So then you sit down and spend some time first creating a good workbench, in the hope that this will support (literally) your work in creating the thing you had started out to make.
Have you ever gone out into the workshop to make something interesting, only to find that the workbench you want to use is too short or long or not high enough? Or maybe it doesn’t have clamps in the right places or it’s just too uneven? So then you sit down and spend some time first creating a good workbench, in the hope that this will support (literally) your work in creating the thing you had started out to make.
Well, that’s what happened to me the other day, in my virtual workshop. I started out intending to make this month’s column about a parallel link checker that verifies if my website has good links, both internally and externally. And I wanted to try something new, since this topic has been beaten to death both by me and by other authors.
The new angle I wanted was to use forked kids to do the lookup and processing for each page, which a parent process could then manage (a bit like herding cats, but close enough). The parent would try to keep all the kids busy, and coordinate the results in the event that a kid got distracted. Also, in the case of link verification, each kid response was likely to point out other links to verify, so some way of coordinating the whole shebang was also needed in the parent.
So, I rummaged around for the right event loop or RPC package. I figured this was already…
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