Wow, that's a lot of bad advice for one message!
I'm amazed to see anyone offering SysV IPC as a solution these days - it was a bad choice years ago when I last used it. So many limitations, so many traps, so much pain, so DAMN SLOW!
I have no idea what mmap would gain you here aside from shared storage. This is clearly a database problem, so you might as well use one. Most likely BDB and MySQL are both using mmap for you.
And for god's sake, don't write your own DB in C!
-sam
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Those are quite strong words for a post that includes no benchmarks. I put together three small test programs, one using MySQL, another using SysV semaphores and shared memory, and another using mmap and a gcc-specific atomic_add operation. On the machine where I ran the code MySQL could increment a counter in a MyISAM table about 2200 times/second, or in a memory table about 3500 times/second. Using SysV IPC, I could increment about 15,540 times/second, not quite 5 times faster than the memory table. Using mmap and system-specific atomic locking instructions from C++, I can increment about 9.6 million times/second, which is about 2700 times faster than a MySQL memory table. With 3 writers, MySQL and SysV take about 3 times as long for all 3 to finish, so they are serialized but not penalized too badly for the lock contention; the mmap+atomic_add version actually gets faster (12.2M times/second), because it can run on two processors at the same time. So there are definitely performance advantages to doing a bit of the work yourself.
Now, if the OP's question hadn't been about performance, that probably wouldn't matter; you're right that SysV IPC is rarely used, and the MySQL code is much easier to understand and maintain. But his question was in fact about performance, and in a later post dino states specifically that the performance of MySQL was not fast enough, so advising him to use it is particularly unhelpful. Also, there are certainly more modern forms of IPC, but none that have builtin support in Perl.
Here is the code I used. If you have anything faster, please post it along with benchmarks.
Update: Fixed some errors in benchmarks (there was no row in MySQL, so the UPDATE statements weren't doing anything. Added another test with mmap+atomic_add. Fixed a typo.
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[d/l]
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Holy cow, that's a lot of code for $counter++! I hate SysV IPC so, so much.
Is it really so fast though? MySQL is storing that data on disk and it's only 4x slower! Is disk 4x slower than memory? No, it's much, much slower. SysV. IPC. Sucks.
If you feel like running more benchmarks for me, change the MySQL one to use a MEMORY table. Then at least you won't have disk writes dragging MySQL down.
-sam
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