Socket Application Design

Hello,

I have been given the task of redesigning our credit card authorization 
application.  Today a store connects to the listener running on a 
corporate server.  A new job is spawned for each connection.   This job 
send the authorization message to a job, CC Send, via data queue that 
sends the auth message to the processor.  The CC Send job keeps a 
persistent socket connection to the processor and all it does is just get 
a message off the data queue, send to processor, get response, and send 
data back to the spawned job via another data queue.  There multiple CC 
Send jobs running so that messages don't get backed up on the data queue.  
Hopefully that makes sense.

I need to have visibly between processes some how.  The CC send job does 
not know if the store ever receives the auth response.  So what I am 
wondering is if it makes sense to combine the processes of receive the 
connections from the stores and sending to the processor?  Or if the 
processes are kept separate, how is the best way to get the data between 
the processes? 

Thanks.
 
Mark Garton
O'Reilly Auto Parts