[zeromq-dev] Async replies?

Martin Sustrik sustrik at fastmq.com
Sun Oct 25 08:24:12 CET 2009


Hi Conrad,

>> 3. Multiple replies to a single request. I've seen this being used but 
>> the semantics are pretty messy IMO. How is the requester going to know 
>> how many replies it's going to receive? To implement it in a sane 
>> fashion the messages on the wire would have to be tagged by BEGIN/END 
>> flags. Still, what is the whole thing good for? And if we want to have 
>> multi-part replies why not allow multi-part requests? Etc.
> 
> This happens to be my use case. You're right that it can get quite messy
> if built out to it's logical complex extreme :-)
> 
> In the abstract my application is similar to a job scheduler that
> receives job submissions and sends status updates to the submitter as
> the job goes through it's lifecycle (e.g. queued, running, failed,
> done).
> 
> Sure, the submitter can poll for the status of the job periodically, but
> it would result in a lot of traffic and a more complex requester.

I would say there are two types of messages involved:

1. management (job submissions, cancelations etc.)
2. notifications (status updates)

What about using 2 sockets instead of 1? REQ/REP one for management, 
PUB/SUB for notifications? The added value would be the ability to 
subscribe to particular subset of notifications. Pseudocode:

socket_t manage (ctx, ZMQ_REQ);

socket_t notify (ctx, ZMQ_SUB);
notify.setsockopt (ZMQ_SUBSCRIBE, "myjob.*");

message_t submission (100);
...
manage.send (submission);

message_t confirmation;
manage.recv (&confirmation);

while (true) {
     message_t status;
     notify.recv (&status);
     ...
}

> 
> Atm the application uses zmq-1 as a convenient, fast two-way pipe that
> takes care of networking complexities for me and I was looking into
> using zmq-2 in the same way.
> 
> Thanks for answering my question, I didn't mean to disrupt your
> weekend :-)

The wether was pretty gloomy here yesterday. There was nothing better to 
do anyway :)

Martin



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