Low level socket locking...

Hi

I am writing a C program to work as an interface between postgres and a
web page. This page will get a LOT of activity.

The system is to be set up like this:

                 Web page, CGI generated
                        |
         Connection to handler process via unix socket
                        |
     Handler process, that has a postgres connection open.

This is set up in this way because I need to do many similar jobs with the
database, but obviously, every time the web page is accessed, a new copy of
the cgi script is created, and if I were to create a new connection to the
database every time this would a) mean spawning LOTS of copies of the
postgres backend, very slow, and b) I wouldnt get the advantages of any
caching that is done.
Thus I send a simple message from the CGI to the handler process, which
then interracts with the database, and returns the result.

Now, my problem is this.

The page being accessed is likely, in time, to get enough hits that as the
jobs are handled one at a time by the handler process (by the nature of the
postgres C librray functions), it is very feasable that a backlog could form.

I was planning on simply fork()ing the handler process. The database would be
open on each child, and I could happily process them all easilly. However
it occurred to me that I do not know how the socket code between the
postgres libraries and the postgres backend is handled? Is there a socket
locking process in place, to prevent two children passing data down the same
socket at the same time, thus causing garbled data to be received at the other
end? If I fork() and send data from one of say, three child processes, am
I guarenteed to get the data back at the same child?
(this all assumes that I open the database connection and then fork() after)


Thanx in advance for any info