Subject: Maxima servermode: stability of commands....
From: Robert Dodier
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 08:56:29 -0600
Hello Michele,
> Originally STACK would launch a single maxima instance for every
> operation (slooow and possibly congesting when... say 20 pupils
> trying a questionnnaire!). I've written some code to launch maxima
> in servermode (-s port) and to act as a proxy/multiplexer for
> evaluation calls from STACK.
Well, attempting to share an instance of Maxima is problematic.
There are a lot of global variables, and it's more or less
impossible at present to guarantee that changes made in
one session don't affect another session.
Relaunching Maxima guarantees every session is fresh.
Maybe there is some way to optimize the launching
business at the web server or operating system level --
e.g. is there some way to specify that the pages occupied
by Maxima are "sticky" in some way? (So they needn't
be reloaded. Dunno if that's actually possible.)
I would like to see a bona fide server mode in which
a single instance of Maxima responds to multiple clients
without them stepping on each other's toes.
It's probably not too much work, and it would be very useful.
> can you spot something whose behaviour has changed
> from 5.9.2 to 5.9.3 ?
Nothing jumps out -- however there were a lot of changes, see:
http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/maxima/maxima/ChangeLog-5.9.3
Sorry I can't be more helpful,
Robert Dodier