perlbal use case question

Mark Smith smitty at gmail.com
Tue Jun 10 18:16:34 UTC 2008


> Re: Apache - the only reason I thought I'd need to use that  would be for
> SSL handling - i was under the impression that Perlbal didn't handle SSL
> sessions - maybe it does?   These have to be signed certificates (i.e
> Verisign, etc due our clients requirements).

Perlbal can do SSL.  I'm not aware of it being tested in a high volume
environment, though.  But if you're going to do SSL in software anyway
(at Apache) then you might look at trying it to reduce a moving part.

> I like the idea of Perlbal waiting but again not knowing much about it, it's
> described as being single threaded so I assumed that it can't block on a
> request like that but I guess some asynchronous call could be made and then
> return?     Should I be looking into the hooks documentation?    I'm not
> sure where to even start at this point.

Yes, Perlbal itself is single-threaded.  It is designed to work
asynchronously with all I/O, and that is fairly straightforward.  I
think what you want is doable, but yes, it would require some custom
plugin work.  You can look at the hook documentation, but you will
need some knowledge of Perlbal's functioning in order to do what
you're looking for in it.

Really though, it shouldn't be too bad, since you can use the reproxy
logic.  You'll have to modify it to fetch all of the URLs and do
whatever custom work you want done with them (i.e. aggregate them all
together into one response or what?) but it's doable.  So yes -
Perlbal can do what you want, but it doesn't sound completely trivial,
and if you're new to Perlbal (and from the sounds of it Perl itself)
then it may prove to be a tough task.

If you do want to take a stab at it though, I'd be happy to help with
reviewing/guiding/whatever.  I'm sure there are others on the mailing
list who would help out too.  (As long as you're willing to contribute
the plugin/modifications to Perlbal back to the community, of course!)


-- 
Mark Smith / xb95
smitty at gmail.com


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