Re: [hylafax-users] Multiple pager in one session

[Robert Colquhoun <rjc@trump.net.au>]

At 03:29 PM 3/16/01 -0700, Lee Howard wrote:
>At 04:14 PM 3/16/01 -0600, Carlos Azcarate wrote:
> >I have the hylafax up and running very fine. It works just as needed except
> >for a little detail:
> >
> >My system generates hundreds of messages for pager by hour, and every page
> >means a dial-up,send one,hang-up routine with the same pager services
> >provider.  This means that a pager message keeps in queue for as long as 20
> >minutes ( I've fixed the KillTimeMap to allow this ). Is there a way I can
> >use to make the system ( pagesend ) dial-up, send-many, hang-up ?
>
>This would equate to the same concept as fax-batching (sending multiple fax
>jobs per one call, including sending fax jobs queued after the call began).
>  Currently HylaFAX does not support fax-batching, and so I doubt that
>page-batching is supported, either.

It is a very much needed feature though.

>The problem is that in order to do that right, the sending routines need to
>be multi-threaded, and HylaFAX isn't.  Although, I can think of ways to do
>this without multi-threading, but definately, it's an inferior design.

Yes, a multithreaded fax server would be a much cleaner design, but i think 
is not strictly necessary to accomplish job batching.

Awhile back i was going to implement one of the 'inferior designs' as a 
make do either a 'look back into the queue' to see if there were any jobs 
to the same destination when the first job was being prepared, or perhaps a 
'batch on entry'  which merged the jobs to the same destination when they 
were added to the queue.  Or perhaps some kind of 'job group idea'......

But once i got into it things got very messy very quickly and i realised it 
would take some time to do.  Other priorities took over and i never got 
very far....


>Multi-threading HylaFAX would help out in a number of other places -
>so if you feel up to it ;-)

Communication and control between the different parts of hylafax would be 
much better.  Done right i think the code would be much easier to 
understand and maintain long term.

I don't think you can add multithreading to the current code base though 
without a great deal of difficulty, the design is just too different from 
what is currently in place.

- Robert



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