drbarpg

A protocol implementation for Distributed Ruby (DRb), supporting connections via a PostgreSQL server by using the LISTEN/NOTIFY event system.

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.

Usage

Add to your Gemfile :

gem 'drbarpg'

Run

$ bundle install
$ rake drbarpg:install:migrations
$ rake db:migrate

Ensure the value of pool in your config/database.yml is high enough (at least 10).

Example server

# Startup Rails environment
require 'config/environment'

# start up the DRb service
DRb.start_service "drbarpg://myserver", []

# wait for the DRb service to finish before exiting
DRb.thread.join

Example client:

require 'config/environment'

# Start a local DRbServer to handle callbacks.
#
# Not necessary for this small example, but will be required
# as soon as we pass a non-marshallable object as an argument
# to a dRuby call.
DRb.start_service "drbarpg://"

# attach to the DRb server via the server URI
remote_array = DRbObject.new_with_uri("drbarpg://myserver")

p remote_array.size  # => 0

remote_array << 1

p remote_array.size  # => 1

Description

drbarpg makes it possible to create DRb-connections via the connection to a PostgreSQL server. It easily integrates into rails projects and uses the configured database connection for inter process communication.

Method calls with a size of less than 8000 bytes for all serialized parameters are directly passed through by the NOTIFY payload. This bypasses the transaction overhead in the database, so the calls are reasonably fast (approximately 1.5 of the time of a direct DRb-TCP connection). Calls with bigger parameter size are transferred by INSERT/SELECT and require transaction commits, so they usually take several milliseconds.

Requirements

PostgreSQL 9.0+
Rails 3.0+