Re: Distributed Systems Annex, data sharing between programs

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

On 9 Cze, 03:10, tmo...@acm.org wrote:
> >The solution is to stop thinking in terms of RPC (remote procesure
> >calls), and start thinking in terms of messages.
>
>   How about asynchronous remote procedure calls.  They just
> fire-and-forget

Exactly. The difference is that with messages you do not have to
*forget*.
Firing and forgetting is easy - but firing and getting results later
on or just checking what has succeeded and what has not is an entirely
different use case. Messaging provides a valid solution to this
problem, while RPC not so much.

> Or in the
> example of possibly dead targets, use synchronous RPC that handles
> Communication_Error.

That can take several hundred milliseconds (or even many seconds) for
a failing call. Remember - you have *thousands* of targets.

>   But setting up the partition mapping for thousands of partitions might
> indeed be inappropriate.  ;)

Yep. The point is - this is no longer a single program. Just as our
communication here is not between separate partitions of a single
human entity, but rather between separate and autonomous entities.
Look, we don't even need to be awake at the same time for this
communication to happen. Why? How would you do that with "calls"
instead of "messages"?
Our posts here are messages, not calls.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com