[Spread-users] Spread newbie -- spread application questions....

[Jerry Asher]

I am building an application involving several hundred servers all behind our firewall.  I would like to send various heartbeat and status messages around, and I am thinking that I could use a multicast application and/or Spread.

I have read the spread faq and the first 15 pages of the spread user guide.

Did I interpret a statement correctly that Spread isn't really applicable for a system of several hundred machines?

Also, another developer tells me that when he looked at Spread he discovered that many of Spread's reliability benefits derive from Spread writing messages to disks.  Is that true?  Does spread involve the disk (we would prefer to find something that uses only memory....)?

Finally, is there a specific format for spread messages, or do we layer our own protocol over spread?  I would basically like to tunnel http requests over the spread "backbone".  Why? Because my favorite swiss army knife is aolserver and that is a highly programmable and modifiable webserver.  So how hard would it be to tunnel http gets or posts across spread?

Thank you,


Jerry Asher