[MOBY-dev] Significant but "invisible" change to MOBY Central configuration

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all,

I just thought I should give everyone a heads-up about a change I made to  
MOBY Central a couple of days ago, since it will cause *slightly*  
different behaviour than what you might be used to.

the Config.pm file used to create a new instance of dbConfig.pm every time  
it was called.  dbConfig in turn calls the mobycentral.config text file  
and reads-in the configuration fields.  As a result, it was always  
possible to re-configure MOBY Central's calls to the back-end database  
simply by editing mobycentral.config without having to restart Apache.   
THIS IS NO LONGER THE CASE!  It turns out that dbConfig was opening and  
closing the mobycentral.config file sometimes several thousand times over  
a matter of seconds under high server load!  Clearly this is not a Good  
Thing :-)  so I have re-coded Config.pm to store the contents of  
mobycentral.config as a Class variable.  As such, it is read ONCE upon  
Apache startup (under mod_perl) and this stored copy is then available to  
every child Apache process.

As such, from now on whenever you edit the mobycentral.config file you  
will need to restart Apache.

I hope this doesn't cause anyone too much headache!

Mark


-- 
Mark D Wilkinson, PI Bioinformatics
Assistant Professor, Medical Genetics
The James Hogg iCAPTURE Centre for Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research
Providence Heart + Lung Institute
University of British Columbia - St. Paul's Hospital
Vancouver, BC, Canada