Interesting question. My first thought is: What's the big deal about 200 processes or threads? That would almost certainly be the easiest solution.

Assuming there's some good reason why that won't work, what you would need to be able to do is asynchronous database operations. Either a way to get a callback or a signal when results are ready, an implementation that guaranteed that some filehandle would be selectable only when there's results to read, or at least something you could poll with. You could look at your database's driver options to see if this is possible; if only the C version of the driver supports it, you could use Inline::C to talk to it.

Another option would be to proxy the results through something that would send you some kind of notification, or only make a filehandle selectable when results were ready. You could use some kind of RPC interface, like SOAP, or extend something like DBD::pNet to give it these capabilities.

But those are much harder than managing 200 threads or processes. :-)


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In reply to Re: a IO:SELECT problem by sgifford
in thread a IO:SELECT problem by ablmf

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