This software shows how to use 0MQ with broker processes fetching tasks to do rather than being sent tasks. The main difference is that tasks are only sent to available workers, rather than queued in a round-robin fashion amongst all the workers independently of their status (busy or free).
Also, this broker will give the task to another worker if it has not been achieved in a given time. The task will be retried at most a certain number of times, so that if it makes all worker crash it will not try to run forever.
I wrote this to have some material when answering some interesting questions asked on StackOverflow about 0MQ.
In a terminal, launch the broker with a maximum of 3 attempts to complete each request and a maximum time of 2 seconds by attempt:
./broker.py -t 3 -T 2 "tcp://*:4161" "tcp://*:4162" "tcp://*:4163"
In two other terminals, launch two workers by issuing twice:
./testworker.py tcp://localhost:4162 tcp://localhost:4163 0.1
Each worker will drop 10% (0.1) of the tasks it receives (and never answer).
In another terminal, launch a client:
./testclient tcp://localhost:4161
You should see the tasks arrive on the workers. When a worker decide to drop a task (as would be the case if the task had caused an exception to be raised), you will see that the task is retried as needed. This is transparent for the client unless the maximum number of attempts has been reached, in which case it will receive an empty answer indicating a failure.
This code is released under a BSD license.
Copyright (c) 2010 Samuel Tardieu sam@rfc1149.net
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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