Re: Socket Question

Scott,
 

I agree with you, provided that there's a one-to-one relationship 

between 

JobA and JobB.  Does one JobA always talk to one JobB?  Or does JobB 
handle multiple instances of JobA simultaneously?  That's where things 
start to get hairy.

 
There is not a one-to-one relationship.  I may have 20-40 instances of 
JobA and only 5 of JobB.  It scales nicely since all I have to is add 
another instance of JobB.  This has worked nicely until now.

Scalability might be a problem.  How many sockets do you think you'd 

need 

to handle at once?

 
Today, maybe 40 but that continues to grow.

 

As you correctly surmised, this is application handles a high volume 

of 

transactions. Would I just create multiple jobs, each listening on a 
different port?

You could, but it wouldn't achieve load balancing!  Each connection 

would 

have to decide ahead of time which port to connect to.  It might make 
sense to have only one port that connections can be made on so that your 

program can take over the load balancing aspects of it.

There are two aspects of load balancing.  Today the client (store user) is 
divided between corporate servers.  So the client tries ServerA and if it 
doesn't respond, it tries ServerB. 

Then JobB, which connects to the outside vendor, has muliple socket 
connections to the vendor for redundancy and load balancing. I just 
round-robin between the connections to the vendor. If I combined the jobs, 
the new job would need to be able to receive connections from the clients 
and while keeping 4 persistent connections to the vendor. 

At this point I am not sure what to do.  I need to get the current process 
working asap.  The redesign is a future project unless that is my only 
choice to get this working.

Thanks again.

Mark