I am re-developing a system that will send messages via http to one of a number of suppliers. The original is perl scripts and it's likely that the re-development will also use perl.

In the old system, there were a number of perl scripts all running at the same time, five for each supplier. When a message was put into the database, a random thread number (1-5) and the supplier was chosen to ensure that no message was processed twice while avoiding having to lock the table/row. Additionally there was a "Fair Queue Position" field in the database to ensure that a large message send didn't delay small sends that happened while the large one was being sent.

At some times there would be just a couple of messages per minute, but at other times there would be a dump of potentially hundreds of thousands of messages. It seems to me like a resource waste to have all the scripts running and checking for messages all of the time so I am trying to work out if there is a better way to do it, or if the old way is acceptable.

My thoughts right now lie with the idea of having one script that runs and forks as many child processes as are needed (up to a limit) depending on how much traffic there is, but I am not sure how best to implement it such that each message is processed only once, while the fair queuing is maintained.

My best guess right now is that the parent script updates the DB to indicate which child process should handle it, however I am concerned that this will end up being less efficient than the original method. I have little experience of writing forking code (last time I did it was about 15 years ago).

Any thoughts or links to guides on how best to process message queues appreciated!