The cron won't help. The problem is that the connections are spread into the webserver childs, and when an http request comes in (from a client or the cron job) it is handled by a (more or less) random child. No way to make sure every child gets an request every 5 minutes.

What happens if the connection times out? The server closes it and is happy, or does the backend server have any problems with it? And, is there any kind of "ping" message the perl wrapper could send to test if the connection is still alive?

I would just let the connections time out and don't care. If a perl wrapper finds the connection dead, it just silently opens a new one. 

  # $conn ||= connect();
  if (not $conn or is_dead($conn) {
    $conn = connect();
  }
  my $status = send($conn, 'abc');
  if ($status == CONN_DEAD) {
    $conn = connect();
    $status = send($conn, 'abc');
  }

[download]
Search, Ask, Know

In reply to Re: Re: Re: HTTP server guidance by Beechbone
in thread HTTP server guidance by DaveH

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.