.TH "old" 1 "2003-12-23"
.SH "NAME"
old - Open Lock Daemon
.SH "SYNOPSIS"
.B old
.I [nthreads]
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
.B old
is a simple lock server which provides central point where to lock resources
in a distributed environment by using TCP/IP to communicate with its clients.
.PP
It provides basic locking primitives (lock, unlock and trylock) that handle
objects identified by strings of any kind, so it's really a general purpose
server that you can use to lock anything, from files to pointers, as long as
you name them using a coherent object naming scheme.
.PP
The network protocol is quite lightweight and simple, it's documented in the
source package. There's also a library called libold(3) that provides the
primitives as simple functions pretty much like pthreads does.
.SH "OPTIONS"
.TP
.B nthreads
Tell the number of processing threads to start. It defaults to 1, and it
should be the same number of processors you have on your system. Note that
there is no point in incresing it more, because old is entirely CPU bound and
it might even slowdown things.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
libold(3)
.SH "AUTHOR"
old was written by Alberto Bertogli (albertogli@telpin.com.ar). The website is
at http://users.auriga.wearlab.de/~alb/old/