Question

I am trying to create a Ruby daemon process which clients will be able to connect to.

I need to ensure that the remote Ruby process always remains up and available for connection, so I need to detect network outages or unreachable errors.

I was thinking of having a heartbeat mechanism at the application level between clients and the server, and a timeout in the client if the connection fails.

I was told the select method in Ruby could be of help as well but not sure.

Can anyone share any good links/resources or impart some general wisdom to create reliable and fast daemon processes in Ruby?

Answer 1

I think a lot of people would use eventmachine for this type of application. At its core, it uses epoll (which is similar to select) to decide which socket to deal with next. There are lots of gems that build on eventmachine to allow you to run different types of servers. One example is em-websocket.