New File System Watcher

We're announcing Queue Folders 2.0 today. Queue Folders is a file system watcher we've integrated with RPM Elite.

Basically, you can configure any queue to monitor any local hard drive folder you have. I used both my C: and D: partitions during testing, all without issue.

In the previous version we tied you to a single directory hierarchy, so you were stuck with using the folder that version dictated to you. Now you can use any folder you wish, so long as it's not a shared drive (no network folders) or a removable drive. The latter is mainly for sanity, so if we lost touch with the drive we wouldn't affect watching other folders.

RPM Elite now has 4 ways to submit jobs:

  1. LPD, which we recently updated considerably
  2. Telnet, also updated earlier this year
  3. Queue Folders which uses Windows file notification events
  4. Our internal Remote Procedure Call, which the user interface uses when you drag and drop jobs from Windows Explorer

The speed at which Queue Folders operates is phenomenal. I didn't know what to expect ... but, using the built-in diagnostic logging I counted on average 40 files recognized and transmitted per millisecond. RPM can't possibly create jobs that fast, so we cache the notifications and add your files as jobs as fast as the database allows.

We do essentially the same thing with LPD and Telnet jobs starting not long before the RPM 6.2 release. We now support your network going as fast as possible without adding the latency of database operations.

We worked extensively with Queue Folders in-house and so have some words of practical experience to offer. We hope you check out that section of the site and let us know what your experience is with Queue Folders.

To get Queue Folders:

  • if you have RPM Elite installed already, in the user interface go to Help / Check for Updates and get version 6.2.0.484 or later
  • If you need to download RPM Elite please do so, install it, then go to the user interface as described above