[Spread-users] spread daemon as library?

[Kim Barrett]

We are developing a system that involves network communication among
multiple processors, and in many ways spread looks like a good fit
for us.

However, one way in which it might not be ideal is the presumption of
a spread daemon process which other processes on a given processor
communicate with. It turns out that in our system the vast majority
(probably all on some processors) of local client communication with
the spread daemon on a given processor would be from a single process
on that same processor. In the interest of reducing context switch
and IPC overhead, we are starting to look at the possibility of
making the daemon into a library that can be directly linked against
by that one program of ours.

It looks like the initialization of the daemon in main() in
daemon/spread.c is pretty straightforward, and could be repackaged as
a function to be called from our program. The hard part appears to be
replacing the network plumbing between the client-side interface and
the daemon's processing with a direct in-memory connection.

Before possibly spending a lot of time going down this path, we're
soliciting opinions from folks more familiar with spread as to
whether this might actually be worthwhile or not, or whether it is
perhaps just plain goofy to try this.