Here's a doozy.

I have 50 or so custom-developed serial devices that I'm controlling via a multiport serial board. All of the devices need to be able to talk to one another, so data from one device needs to be able to be routed to any other (contention issues notwithstanding).

Here's my current problem: there needs to be a master "database" of the state information for all of the devices. I currently have one program running per serial port that does serial I/O and connects to a server, which fork()s a copy of itself off to deal with I/O to that client (note that this is not necessarily the way this must be done, just my current foray). The problem is that I can't think of a Very Fast Way for all of the devices to share a single "database" of data.

I've considered using System V Shared Memory, but have heard bad things about it. I have considered using a real database such as MySQL, but that would be horribly slow considering that each device is read and responded to in microseconds. Ideally I need some way to directly manipulate the same data structure via multiple processes, which I know sounds really stupid.

Any ideas?

Edit by tye