[Beowulf] Re: dealing with lots of sockets

[Geoff Jacobs]

Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
>> Event driven programming typically uses registered callbacks that are
>> triggered by a central "Event Loop" when events happen. In such a
>> system, one never blocks for anything -- all activity is performed in
>> callbacks, and one simply returns from a callback if one can't proceed
>> further.
> 
> And here is one of the problems that event driven programming can't
> really solve: separation between the central event loop and the code to
> run when events happen. fork() allows the newly created process to
> proceed at its own will and possibly doing its own mistakes (like buffer
> overflows) in its own address space - the parent process is not affected
> in any way and this allows f.e. daemons to run their core loop with
> administrative priviledges while the real work can be done as a dumb user.

Which is the reason why djbdns, qmail and postfix do things the way they
do. Sendmail X will be going this way.