Regarding the following question on Nodes…
Exercise: Nodes-4
The ticker process in this chapter is a central server that sends events to
registered clients. Reimplement this as a ring of clients. A client sends a
tick to the next client in the ring. After 2 seconds, that client sends a tick to
its next client.
When thinking about how to add clients to the ring, remember to deal with
the case where a client’s receive loop times out just as you’re adding a new
process. What does this say about who has to be responsible for updating
the links?
…specifically the second half of the question.
After my implementation I could not think of where this was a problem that I faced, i.e. remembering to deal “with the case where a client’s receive loop times out as you’re adding a new process”, I just did not have an arbitrary timeout on my clients. Regarding what this says about “who has to be responsible for updating links”, I intuitively assigned that responsibility to the most recently added client, since the most recent client will receive ticks from the second most recent, and take over second most recent clients prior tick duties.
Is there something more that I don’t understand, or that I’m not appreciating?
