Forum OpenACS Development: About code executed in a new thread

Hello,

I need to work with threads working in background, so I am using 'ns_thread' and/or 'ad_schedule_proc' (I have not decided which one yet). When using them, I find the following behaviour:

The code executed by the new thread is the existing code when the server started up, no matter if I've made changes on the procedure.

However, if I call the same code directly (without threads), the code is correctly updated whenever I make changes on it. Of course, the server is watching the corresponding files.

So the question is: Is there anyway to re-register the process and execute the updated code in the thread? (Restarting the server on every test is so boring...)

Thanks in advance
Luis

"It also allows you to reload code when you are using performance mode and the standard reload mechanism does not run"

I'm really interested in this as we are relying in our daily reboot to get the changes in in our production server.

So if I want to reload request-procesor-procs.tcl I just have to run in ds

ns_eval {source /path-of-our-source/packages/acs-tcl/tcl/request-procesor-procs.tcl }

Would it be possible to change apm reload behaviour to match this when performance_p is activated?

Thanks in advance

Luis,

Have you tried to separate command and args?

set command_name "imsld::gsi::${plugin}::check_requisite"
set command_args "-petition_id $petition_id"

ant then

ad_schedule_proc -thread t -once t 0 $command_name $command_args

Hi Luis!

Try this:


ad_proc -public test::test {param} {
.... (note the positional parameter)
}

set command_name "test::test"
set command_args 5 # use a list if you want more parameters

ad_schedule_proc -thread t -once t 0 $command_name $command_args


Yes, in fact it makes more sense to just reload using ns_eval all the time.

We still would need to handle XQL changes, but since the XQL is shared across threads (I think, I really need to check again) just calling dq_qd_load_query file directly will reload the xql.

I had some experimental code for this, but I might have misplaced it when I reinstalled everything on my computer.

I am willing to work on this to get this feature into the next version of OpenACS.

Luis,

You might want to consider xotcl-core and its threading helpers, defined in xotcl-core/tcl/40-thread-mod-procs.tcl. There are many nice aspects about these helpers (persistent vs. volatile threads), but, regarding your case, ordinary apm reloads are supported. Once the thread-declaring file is piped throught the apm reload mechanism, the ::xotcl::THREAD object takes care of re-initialising the managed Tcl thread (through the XOTcl recreation mechanism, for the interested reader). But the interface hides this from you, completely!

See api-doc for intro reading ...

cheers
//stefan