High Fibre Programming

Finally, after almost five months, version 0.0.3 is ready!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fat-controller/files/

There are plenty of changes, mostly bug fixes which relate to startup options (not the actual running of The Fat Controller) and a new thread model – fixed interval – which runs processes like cron at fixed, regular intervals between each new process creation.

Here are some highlights from the changelog:

ADDED Fixed interval thread model
The ‘independent thread model’ and ‘dependent thread mode’ start another instance of the target program a specified number of seconds after the previous instance ends. The ‘fixed interval thread model’ starts another instance a specified number of seconds after the previous instance starts, hence the interval beteen new instances is fixed. The interval is specified using the -s,--sleep argument, just as for the other thread models. Note that the interval is respected even if a process returns status 64. Only if a process returns a status of -1 will the interval specified by -e,--sleep-on-error be used.

ADDED Long running instance termination
Using the --proc-run-time-max argument, it is now possible to specify that an instance be terminated if it runs longer than the specified number of seconds. Default behaviour is never to terminate processes unless the main Fat Controller process is requested to shutdown. (Processes terminated by sending SIGTERM). It is advised to specify this argument.

Plans for v0.0.4
I’ve already drawn up a rough list of features and improvements for v0.0.4, the most important being changing the logging of sub-processes. Rather than collecting from STDOUT and writing everything to the log file once a sub-process ends, The Fat Controller will continually write whatever arrives from STDOUT and STDERR to log files. This will make things much better for long running sub-processes.

If you have any ideas or suggestions then please comment or file a report on the Sourceforge Fat Controller tracker page:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=386594

It’s been ages in development (sorry about that) but the next version of The Fat Controller is almost ready! Apart from really quite a lot of bug fixes the main new feature is called “fixed interval mode” which works more like CRON in that scripts are executed at precise time intervals, unlike measuring the interval from when a script ends. This brings in a whole host of new problems, such as multiple instances, maximum instances, what to do when we’ve reached the maximum number of instances and so on, and yes, there are plenty of new configuration options to address all of this!

After finding quite a few embarrassing bugs in v0.0.2, I’ve decided to spend some time on Quality Assurance, which is what I’m currently doing before releasing v0.0.3. If anyone wants to help out with this then please let me know – any and all help is appreciated!