Re: A proposal for a General Clustering Framework

[Alan Robertson <alanr@unix.sh>]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 07:34:22PM -0600, Alan Robertson wrote:
> 
> > Performance data seems different from event data (which is what was under
> > discussion).
> 
> It may seem different to you, but if you provide pub/sub services, it
> fits it quite nicely. Perhaps you don't know what kind of data I'm
> talking about. Say you're doing load balancing and need to make
> distributed decisions about which member to talk to. One easy and good
> way to do that is to distribute an idea of what the "load" of various
> machines is. It is control information, of a sort.

This ticked off a minor flame war the last time I mentioned it, but
heartbeat distributes basic load information with every packet.  It's only a
few bytes, and compared to the overhead in the RPC-XML format, a very small
amount of data indeed ;-)

The right thing to figure out is how to create an API / design which allows
for this kind of data distribution, and yet also allows for other methods of
it being distributed.

See the paper (or better yet module.c) for my definitions of "module" and
"plugin"...

Perhaps the heartbeat module can register both as a transport plugin and as
a performance data plugin...

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr@unix.sh

Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
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