[dancer-users] How can a fork+system() Dancer app not create zombie processes?

[Andrew Solomon]

Hi Nathan

It might be helpful to address this problem through a separation of
concerns. You've got the Dancer app's job which is to serve web pages. Then
there's another job - to send emails - and from this viewpoint it makes
sense to implement that as a separate piece of software.

On a large scale this can be done using a queuing service where the Dancer
app puts a message onto the message queue (managed by a broker like
RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ....) and your email sending software pulls the message
off the queue and sends the email.

On a smaller scale I've done this without a message broker by treating a
table in a database as a message queue - the Dancer app writes a line to
the table with details of the message to send. A separate script - a daemon
based on this https://metacpan.org/pod/Daemon::Control checks for any new
records in the table, sends the appropriate message and marks the row as
'sent'.

There's more than one way to skin a cat so that's just another approach to
consider. Good luck!

Andrew



On 29 Jun 2017 06:56, "Nathan Bailey" <web at polynate.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>    I want to send my Dancer2 TT page as an email *and* continue to
> generate a normal web response.
>
> This forking discussion seems like an excellent approach.
>
> I have:
> 1. Created a fork in 'hook before_layout_render' (based on a 'var
> want_email = 1;').
> 2. The parent continues to serve the webpage (as normal, after undef'ing
> want_email), the grandchild sends the email (in 'hook after_layout_render')
>
> *(I'm doing this in before_layout_render so I can change the layout
> (app->template_engine->layout('email');) to a lighter, more email-friendly
> layout)*
>
> An additional benefit of this approach is that the email is sent
> asynchronously, since Gmail-dispatched emails seem to take 2-3s to send.
>
> This all works well and I am grateful for this discussion and Andy's
> example code, but I am unclear about the guard, per below.
> I understand what it is intended to do, but if I put:
>    my $guard = guard { info "I'm dying"; POSIX::_exit(0); };
> in my code, the code immediately prints the "I'm dying" and exits.
>
> Am I missing something in how to use Guard properly?
>
> BTW, if someone has a better pattern for emailing a page, I'd welcome it.
>
> cheers,
> Nathan
>
> On 3 April 2017 at 21:21, Andrew Beverley <andy at andybev.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 13:22:16 +0300 Shlomi Fish wrote:
>> > like "guard"s
>>
>> You should consider a guard, to ensure that nothing in the grandchild
>> causes it to hang around. For example, if there is an exception which
>> is then caught before the _exit(), you can end up with the grandchild
>> hanging around serving web requests to nobody ;-)
>>
>
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