CompuServe Messages

I'd set the daemon at a priority of +5 over the other database program(s). My reasoning is that you want an updates, etc. to complete as fast as possible. Otherwise you'll leave your self open for a slowdown and a good possibility of losing data integrity. Figure user A wants to update record 1234 and the message gets passed to your daemon. User B wants to read record 1234. The daemon starts to do the update, but it's time slice ends before it's done. Since the reader program (user B) is running at the same priority…it starts it's read operation on the partially updatted data. Another way to handle that, whatever the priority, is to have the daemon, as it's first task, lock the record via a flag. Then user B, when attempting to read the record, would "see" that flag and wait until the flag was cleared. But even doing it that way, you'd want the update operation to complete as fast as possible so that user B didn't have to wait too long.