[Spread-users] Local connection heartbeats

[Alec H. Peterson]

Hi all,

I've been casually familiar with Spread for a long time, but only  
recently have I been looking at its use cases in more details.  I am  
curious about the following scenario.  Several spread nodes on a LAN,  
with a local application talking with each spread process.  One of  
the application processes becomes wedged (simulated by sending it a  
SIGSTOP), and is unable to process messages.  The result is that the  
messages buffer on the local Spread process, but what if I wanted  
Spread to detect the process being essentially 'gone' and have it  
change the group membership, which could be detected by a periodic  
"spread heartbeat" that the application would call.  If Spread  
doesn't detect a heartbeat after a while it could just close down the  
connection.

Is this feasible?  I realize it could break some of the EVS  
semantics, although it actually doesn't affect the ordering of the  
messages, but rather the delivery of same...

Alec