I have a cluster of CPUs generating thumbnails for a render farm. I would like to place thumbnail requests on a queue, and have the cluster of client dequeue the requests and process them. Of course, each request should be only dequeued once... if a thumbnail is being processed by one CPU, it shouldn't be processed by another CPU. Does the following sound like a reasonable approach? If not, what's a good way to go? The processes generating the requests will insert into a queue table. They may add a priority and timestamp. The several processes servicing the requests will do a SELECT FOR UPDATE where ... limit 1, generate thumbnail, delete the record and commit. Comments and suggestions welcome, Mark -- Mark Harrison Pixar Animation Studios
