determining how full a named pipe is

[RoyHB]

I believe that named pipes have a maximum size - as I recall the max size increased via some recent kernel release.

Anyway - my application is I have a task that connects with a remote server and receives lines of text... I process the text and send it on to another task on my server that parses the text and makes some database entries.

I would like to monitor the 'fullness' of the named pipe because if it starts to get to the point of being full I'd like to know - I may be able to throttle the data rate from the upstream server or I may decide to use more than one pipe but without knowing if there is a problem.....

So how do I monitor the named pipe? Much of my work uses php 5.3 but a native linux solution or something in c++ would be ok. I'm using Ubuntu 11 server

[voidpointer69]

Hello Roy,

Look up the select() man entry.

This will enable you to determine if the pipe is available to write to.

Set up the pipe as non-blocking. You can then test the result of any "write" you attempt. If you get the error "EWOULDBLOCK", then the pipe is unable to handle the current write.

[RoyHB]

Thanks - I'll give that a try.