December 1, 2010

News on PoD Server

Anar here...

I want to continue to keep you informed on ongoing development of the upcoming stable release of PoD - v3.1.
This time I'm going to cover a new stuff in PoD server implementation, which were done recently.

First of all, the server now starts 3 times faster. A logic of start/stop/restart functions was changed and improved.
I have also improved a server processes discovery algorithm. This algorithms is responsible to find out which of server processes run( uid, pid, and tcp port it listens on). PoD server is a lot more smarter now when handling its processes, even third-party ones, like xproofd and its company. For example, the server implementation got a two-stage-shutdown machinery, which first tries to gracefully shutdown all its processes and only if a process ignores it, the server will send a non-ignorable kill signal to it.
The server now also smartly kills the children of xproofd (like proofserv). It kills not all of children, just by name and user id, but rather it kills only children processes produced by the xproofd, which were started by exactly this PoD server. This brings us one step further in PoD and AliEn integration as well, since it is now possible to start several PoD servers under the same user id - which is a requirement for AliEn Grid. On AliEn all processes run under the same user id.

What is also new in the latest releases is that there is a better support for shared installations. Many minor bugs were fixed. The xproofd configuration, which PoD creates on the fly, is now handled a bit differently. Namely, it stored in user's working directory and renewed every time user restart pod server. This helps to use several PoD versions with the same user's configuration.

If you want to check the new PoD server out, please use the latest nightly build:
http://pod.gsi.de/releases/pod/nightly/

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