Hi Monks!

I have a basic networking/IPC question.

Here's my imaginary setup:

• One main Unix server facing the world.
• Several back-end machines, each with its own database. (The server and the database nodes are all on the same internal network.)
• A need to know price of bananas.

When the server receives a request for the price of bananas, it needs to perform a two-stage query. First, it needs to ask each database node, "How many bananas do you have?". After it hears back from all the machines, it tallies up the total number of bananas and prepares a second query: "There are $count bananas available today. What do each of you want to charge for bananas?" Once it hears back from all the back-end machines, the server then averages the prices and serves that number.

How should the server and the back-end machines communicate with each other?

I'm not really looking for an answer about how the problem could be solved with better database design -- in real life, the problem isn't exactly how I've described it. :) What I need is a basic understanding about what my options are for rapid communication between several machines on an internal network.

TIA!!!

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