How to use Sun RPC for large slow procedure calls

[Nathaniel Mishkin]

In article <GNB.89Oct4171744 at baby.bby.oz> gnb at bby.oz (Gregory N. Bond) writes:
>It seems that Sun RPC is designed for many small and quick calls (e.g.
>NFS), rather than large slow calls (as in my example, or for things
>like numerical compute engines inverting large matricies).  This is
>shown by the heritage of using UDP and timeouts rather than the flow
>control and reliability in TCP.
>
>Does anyone have any idea how to approach this sort of RPC
>application?  Is there some trick or section of TFM that I have
>overlooked?  Does anyone have (oh joy oh bliss) some code for this
>type of RPC work?  Or do I drop Sun RPC entirely as the wrong tool and
>handcraft something using "raw" TCP sockets?

You could use NCS RPC (available for Suns from HP/Apollo).  NCS uses
UDP, but you don't supply timeout values.  It pings the server periodically
(and with lower frequency as the call proceeds without problems) itself.
If the server becomes unresponsive, the client finds out about it.  There
are various other technical difference which I won't enumerate, for fear
of being accused of self-promotion.
                    -- Nat Mishkin
                       Hewlett Packard Company / Apollo Systems Division
                       mishkin at apollo.com