If it's worth for the client to reconnect to another box if the server is busy, I suppose the jobs take relatively long to process, otherwise the client could expect a server process to become free soonish when it enters the listen queue.

Are you sure you want preforked servers for that? Because the preforking is usually done to avoid the fork() overhead if it takes a significant fraction of the whole request processing time.

Otherwise you could have one master process that accepts all connections and can optionally have a little dialog with the client. If it can down a nonblocking semaphore, it just forks and lets the child do the rest, otherwise it tells the client to check another box (you could even have the servers inform each other of their current load so it could give a hint to the client) and hangs up.

In reply to Re^3: TCP server: How to reject connections when busy? (some FM TR) by mbethke
in thread TCP server: How to reject connections when busy? by squirrel

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