Port Monitor Support

Port monitors such as inetd and listen can monitor network addresses for specified RPC services. When a request arrives for a particular service, the port monitor spawns a server process. After the call has been serviced, the server can exit. This technique conserves system resources. The main server function generated by rpcgen allows invocation by inetd. See Using inetd for details.

Services might wait for a specified interval after completing a service request, in case another request follows. If no call arrives in the specified time, the server exits, and some port monitors, like inetd, continue to monitor for the server. If a later request for the service occurs, the port monitor gives the request to a waiting server process (if any), rather than spawning a new process.

When monitoring for a server, some port monitors, like listen(), always spawn a new process in response to a service request. If a server is used with such a monitor, the server should exit immediately on completion.

By default, services created using rpcgen wait for 120 seconds after servicing a request before exiting. You can change the interval with the -K flag. In the following example, the server waits for 20 seconds before exiting. To create a server that exits immediately, you can use zero value for the interval period.

rpcgen -K 20 proto.x

rpcgen -K 0 proto.x

To create a server that never exits, the value is -K -1.

For more information on port monitors, see Appendix F, Writing a Port Monitor With the Service Access Facility (SAF).