App Architecture Feedback

[NewsBot]

I thought I'd request some feedback on a system I'm developing.* I realize there's more than one way to skin a cat, but I would be curious to know if the Niners see any big areas for improvement.

 

My application is a number cruncher.* I've got an EXE that I spin up in two differrent modes.* Running in GUI mode, it sets up a TcpListener and responds to specific requests from clients over the web interface.* Running in Batch mode, it crunches numbers on the entire set of data, waits a few minutes and does it again.* So for every set of data, I'm starting two unique processes.* Each set of data is approximately 20 MB.

 

For each client, we may have to deal with a dozen or so sets of "real" data at any given time.* Furthermore, data is time sensitive, so we may be preparing several new sets of data for the next cycle and we may have to leave old data sets for auditing purposes.* As you can see, spinning up 50 processes--per client--is not out of the realm of possibility.

 

Now because our code in that executable isn't perfect, I've got a "managing" process which monitors all these instances of the application.* It polls them every few minutes to make sure they haven't crashed.* This managing process has the responsibility of starting up these new instances.* Each new instance gets configured via command line arguments set when the managing process starts it.* A database stores a list of all the data set instances which should be running.* The managing process syncs up with the database right before it polls.

 

Now the plan is for each client to have its own managing process.* The idea is that if I have to do some maintenance on any client, I can generally keep from interfering with the other clients.

 

Having so many processes to keep track of seems like a terrible way to do this.* I imagine that the implementation of web servers might shed some light on my situation.

 

I'm open to any suggestions.* I feel like I've been working on it so long, it's tough to think outside the box I've already built.

 

 

EDIT:* Another "problem" is that I have to keep a user session open for all these console apps to run.* Accidentally close that session and you kill the whole system.

 

 

More...

 

View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds