Question

I have two types of processes.

I want process B to wait for a message from process A. Once A sends the message, process B should process the message and wait again.

Also, I will have multiple instances of process A and process B. So, all the B processes should send the messages to all A processes.

I was looking at something like signals, but with a string attached to it.

What is the best way to do this?

I know I can create a pipe and keep reading the pipe in a while, but it seems inneficient. Also, won’t it get removed from the pipe once read?

Note: None of the processes are subprocesses of each other.

Answer 1

This is what I ended up doing at last…

Made the producer process into a module and imported it into the consumer. Thus, both the processes can share variables.

Producer threads will keep producing and consumer threads will keep consuming. And I am using condition to synchronize the data, threading.Condition().

Each Producer thread:

• Acquire condition
• Write data to a global variable
• Call notifyAll()
• Release condition

Each Consumer thread:

• Acquire condition
• Wait for the condition
• Read and process data in the global variable
• Wait for the condition…

This is just a high level view. In my case, I have different types of producer threads each producing different data and meant for a particular group of consumers. So, I have a list of condition.

Reference on condition