Gracefully stopping agents & Timeouts

[taazza]

Two questions

1. When a nanite agent timeouts - Is there a way to detect it with code? Also sometimes the agents come back alive after a long running task. We want to strike a balance between number of agents vs timeouts. Any suggestions/ideas?
2. Also is there an inbuilt way to gracefully stop agents? Something like nanite-agent --token "test" stop --force-after 60 seconds

I did read an email from mattmatt a while ago. Thoughts?

[roidrage]

1. There's callbacks available for timeout, register and unregister in the mapper, the RDoc for Mapper#start has all the info available.
2. Planned feature for me, since we need something similar. I'd like to get some Unix-y stuff like Unicorn has into Nanite so that you can gracefully shutdown and bring up new agents in the meantime.

[taazza]

Regarding the first issue is this functionality available outside of the mapper? That would be ideal. How does the nanite-admin get a hold of it?

Just curious how do you deal with creating new agents to scale? Time-outs impacts that decision for us big time.

[roidrage]

That functionality is only available in the mapper. If you need to react on it with some other means I'd say the best way is to fire off a new request to a management agent.

[taazza]

I am assuming management agent is a different agent that you have only for triggering off processes/agents. Could you pls elaborate? Right now we are using only the mapper & the general purpose agents to take care of tasks.

[roidrage]

A management agent is an agent that you implement, its only difference from your other agents could be that it fires up new agents on your systems. Imagine a setup where each machine runs a management agent and a couple of working agents. You can push a task to the management agent whenever you want to fire up new working agents or to kill some of them. It's nothing Nanite offers at the moment, but I thought about it and it sure would be a nice feature to have. Until then, that'd be my idea of automating the process.

[taazza]

We have been exactly thinking around these lines! Would be a great nanite feature. I guess you have to get the mapper to listen to hook and fire off a request to this agent (& hope & pray that this agent is running ;)). Right now the array issue is the one thats killing us. Will have to get that fixes before we get to this one. I will keep you posted.