[mod_python] IPC, db conn sharing, and other fine things

Hello Mike -

Thanks for taking the time to respond...

My data applications require that multiple clients be able to access
them. These clients include web clients and desktop clients on different
machines across the internet. Thus I build XML-RPC as the middle
language into everything I do. The web client never actually touches the
database. And thus on the server where a "front end" web server resides,
I rarely actually install a database.

Additionally, despite ever increasing horsepower in hardware and ever
increasing efficiency in databases, they sacrifice a lot of efficiency
for durability of data. For a caching system, persistence beyond a crash
isn't really necessary. For a component registering system, it gets
rebuilt every time the server is restarted.

Furthermore the users of my software generally need database features
not offered in MySQL, so I don't really use it very often. PostgreSQL is
probably the most common RDBMS I use.

As far as the global dictionaries suggestion, that will work within any
individual process, but each process will have to maintain their own
disparate cache and registry. I'd thought about it, and I'll probably
give it a shot just to see what the performance hit would be in running
them in each process.

For right now I've hacked together a flat file-based caching/registry
system using libxml2 and fcntl locking. It's performance will work,
though I really miss the speed of an all-in-memory caching/registry
system. *sigh* You make do with what you can.

Thanks again.

-jag