A brief introduction to an ongoing project to create a agent-based command and control infrastructure for long-running Perl applications.

1. Perl Instruments
PtPW’08 - {mailto,xmpp}:melo@simplicidade.org

2. Numbers
• 1993: #1 of Top500: 1024 procs, 59.7Gflops
• 2008: single quad-core Intel Core 2 Duo,
48Gflops
• 1997: with 7264 procs, 1 Tflops reached
• 2008: 16 dual-socket quad-core Intel,
1Tflop - 7264 vs 128 core’s

3. In a networked world...
• You mostly wait for data
• Simple requests, with a fast response
• Some requests, complex to process
• So we don’t do them in real-time

4. Usual solution is the
worker model
Zee
Net

5. Track and Trace
• When problems start, how do you
diagnose it?
• tail -f logfile: which logfile?
• Who dealt with the user request?
• Which webserver?
• Which minion?

6. Perl Instruments
• An agent runs on every Perl program
• Connects to a hub via TCP
• Establishes a bidirectional link between us
and each web-head/worker
• Logging, stats and commands flow between
the two
• Your own C&C system

7. Modules
• Instruments::Agent
• Log::Instruments
• Instruments::Hub
• App::Instruments::Sniffer
• (CatalystX::Controller::Viewer)

8. Typical commands
• “increase log level to debug”
• “... but only for user X”
• “... and only in module M”
• Wish list: a remote real-time Devel::REPL
• Wish list: enable profiling

9. CPAN Hackaton
• Protocol::BLIP
• and then Net::BLIP
• and also AnyEvent::BLIP

10. Thanks!