Stability for BBGServer

It's taken months but the final trick to getting stability into the BBGServer has been to take all references to the Bloomberg API out of the main server and place it into a simple, small, single-threaded, C app that can be loaded and run from the server. The idea is that Bloomberg's API is itself not thread-safe. It can't handle several requests coming and going, and everything I tried to do with locking didn't change that basic fact.

So I created a simple C app that would open up a socket connection back to the server and wait for requests to process. When it received a request it sent it to Bloomberg via it's own connection and then waited for the response. When it got the response, it sent it back to the server and waited for another request on the socket. This was the ticket... get Bloomberg in it's own application with only one request pending at a time.

What's happened is that as soon as I put that into the code things stabilized. No more Bus Errors. No more crashes. It was a wonderful sight.