Windows-like registry for Linux?

[Jerry Feldman]

On Tuesday 14 February 2006 2:36 pm, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> dbm is very fast up to 10s of millions of records. It's not sql so don't
> expect more. You give a key you get a value. Period. It's teenyweeny so
> all the different clients won't bloat from using them.
Actually, Berkeley DataBase is dbm. I have not seen dbm on Linux in quite a 
while. But, it was always the fastest.

In any case, much depends on the type of attributes that Michael's coworker 
is looking at and the persistance. 

For instance if the need is run-time coordination between processes and/or 
threads, the in memory tools, such as ipc(5) or simply the sharing of a 
common data structure using mutexes can work very nicely. Depending on the 
number of attributes, linear or tree-style lookups are still faster than a 
database. 
Additionally, if he needs to deal with independent processes in contrast to 
threads or even forked processes, the task is different. 

In the simple memory environment, you implement a simple protocol:
A client runs, looks into a known place. If it does not exist, start the 
server who initializes it. If it does exist, register so other processes 
may communicate. 

It all comes down to (if I may repeat myself), the amount of data you want 
to store, the structure of the data, the nature of the lookup, and whether 
you need to store the data on disk. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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