Re: rfc: gnome-inetd

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 01:29 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > around is the potential performance problem.  Spawning new processes for
> > each new connection can be fairly heavyweight.  Fortunately, desktop
> > services don't usually serve a large number of users, and many of the
> > interesting protocols don't need a lot of reconnecting (even for things
> > like web sharing, browsers tend to reuse existing connections these
> > days).
> 
> xinetd gets around this a variety of ways. For TCP it allows a daemon to
> start up and be passed the socket. In essence for a given port it does

Just to make sure we're on the same page here, you mean that the daemon
takes over the *listening* socket, yes?  I hadn't thought of that.  Yes
sir, I like it.  ^_^

One still needs a separate library so that you can continue to abstract
away things like access control, and turning the daemon off without just
blatantly SIGTERMing it (although, I guess, assuming the daemon authors
did things right, that would of course work properly anyhow) - i.e.,
when the user disables the service in GConf, the daemon knows to stop
listening for new connections.