[elephant-devel] New cache for elephant postmodern

[Robert L. Read]

I think we should be a little cautious about adding a new dependency.
For example, the dependency on FiveAM for testing forces a lot of things
to be pulled in.  I certainly wouldn't want to make people have to set
up a cron job to use something, and I for one don't even know how to do
that on Windows (I can do it on Unixen.)

So my big questions about this would be:

1)  Is the new feature configurable?  That is, if I don't want to set up
any cron jobs, will everything still work out-of-the-box, even if I
might not get the benefit of this caching?

2)  Do we have tests for it?

3)  Is it possible to do it in some way that does not create an
extra-lisp dependence?  For example, I use timer threads inside lisp in
my own application, which are free with SBCL but are probably platform
dependent...nonetheless, it is far better to have a pure-lisp solution
than to have to move outside lisp where you have an operating-system
dependent issue.

I don't want to sound ungrateful...it is very nice to have people like
yourself magically create new features that we can all potentially use.
But I would also like to know:  what is the benefit of this feature?  If
it provides better performance, can we characterize the improvement?


On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 17:00 +0200, Henrik Hjelte wrote:
> Hello,
> I have some new features for the postmodern backend, made by Alex
> Mizrahi. The most interesting thing is a cache that is safe to use
> between processes. It takes some steps to set up, for example you
> should make a cron job that cleans a table that is used to communicate
> updates between processes. It is best described by comments in the
> source code. We are beta testing it at our site http://stix.to, and it
> seems to work fine but note that it is new code so it should be
> regarded as unstable.
> 
> You can get the patches from this darcs repo:
> http://common-lisp.net/project/grand-prix/darcs/elephant
> 
> /Henrik Hjelte
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