More CGI Stuff

[Yennie at aol.com]

> Can this be done by having MC running in the background *prior* to the
> cgi being called by the server - not sure how the os associated the
> script with the engine.... or whether it creates another process....
> would like to though:)
> 
Unfortunately, no- the server will spawn a new cgi process for each request.
I have found a couple options, however:

1). Run a simple server which takes request from cgi scripts (over sockets), 
and supplies the persistent data.

2) Run a pool of servers, all listening on their own port, and then still 
utilize 1).

I did cook up something fun to play with. I stuck this in a script "httpd" 
and call "./httpd 8080 10" from the terminal. What I get: 10 processes 
listening on ports 8080-8089.

This is somewhat like apache's behavior: a bunch of child processes handle 
requests. Problem is, Apache uses fork() and select(), so it manages to get 
all of the processes listening on the *same* port. I can't see how that is 
possible with Metacard.

#!mc

global thisPort, myID, isLastChild

on startup
   put $1 into thisPort
   put $2 into numChildren
   put $3 into myID
   put $4 into isLastChild

   if (myID is empty) then put 0 into myID

   accept connections on port thisPort with message "newConnect"

   repeat with pID=1 to numChildren-1
     open process ($0&&($1+pID)&&"0"&&(pID)&&(pID = (numChildren - 1)))
   end repeat

end startup

on newConnect s
    read from socket s until empty
    put "HTTP/1.0 200 OK WebCF"&crLF into r
    put "Content-Type: text/plain"&crLF after r
    put "Content-Length: "&length(myID)&crLF&crLF after r
    put myID after r
    write r to socket s
end newConnect
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