[Backgroundrb-devel] Job Queue

[Norman Elton]

After some initial stumblings, I think I've got the hang of  
backgroundrb. It's great! I'd been thinking for many many months how  
cool something like this would be!

I'm trying to make a "job queue". That is, a pool of worker threads  
monitor a queue. When a job appears, one of the workers grabs it and  
executes the task. When complete, the worker returns to watching the  
queue. If all workers are busy, jobs simply sit in the queue until the  
resources are available.

I can see how to build an array containing jobs. And a mutex could be  
used to ensure thread-safe access to the array. But how can the  
workers "go to sleep" until a job arrives?

Any thoughts?

Thanks again!

Norman