[Koha-zebra] Perl Zoom Persistent Connections

[Sebastian Hammer]

At 04:18 AM 8/20/2005 +0200, Thomas D wrote:
>I assume that if the authentication is collective for the client institution
>with all client users users sharing the same persistent connection at the
>client institution, the user specific authentication issue should be avoided.
>
>Is this cookie ID based connection persistence entirely transparent without
>requiring management in PHP/YAZ or other bindings?  I do not find any
>documentation for the ID or cookie management.

Yes. You just set the cookie as a parameter when calling yaz_connect. The 
behavior of the proxy is described in 
http://www.indexdata.dk/yazproxy/doc/proxy-keepalive.tkl.

Mind you, while the proxy can increase performance *dramatically* against 
many targets, it generally doesn't do much for performance against Zebra, 
because it already does most things pretty fast.

>Will the forthcoming Perl Zoom bindings support persistent connections,
>either shared or user specific?

It will 'inherit' all of the functionality of YAZ/ZOOM.

>I had given reasons that I had thought that persistent connections were
>useful with even one user retrieving large result sets in my previous post
>on a different branch of this thread.

If Zebra is the backend engine, they would have to be extremely large 
before you noticed a difference. The latest Zebra supports various 
optimizations of boolean queries, etc., which further reduce the benefits 
of statefull sessions.

But the beauty of the proxy is that you can develop your application 
without it, simply develop your app as if it were stateless (re-submit 
query for every request for more records).. then, if you see a need to 
optimize the setup later, inserting the proxy into the loop requires not 
more than a line or two of code changes to your application.. the proxy 
will optimize away repeated searches and simply turn them into 'present' 
requests against an existing result set.

--Sebastian

--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data, www.indexdata.com
Direct phone: (603) 209-6853 Fax: (603) 357-1813