Beacon Lifecycle

[Silvan.Fischer]

Hi there

We're trying to gather some facts about Beacon Lifecycle in Mobile Agents. From the documentaion is says that beacons are only persisted if they can't be transmitted. So can we assume that once the beacon is sent out, it gets deleted immediately?

Best

Silvan

[Jonathan.Weng]

Hello Silvan,

Yes, simply put, once a beacon is sent across the network, the local copy is deleted immediately.

To explain in a little more detail, individual events such as button clicks are enqueued in memory and sometimes persisted to the file system as individual files if the queue in memory is getting too large. A number of these files are then gzipped into a single file which makes up a beacon (or sometimes beacons are created from the in-memory queue directly). In case the beacon fails during transmission, the file is persisted so that it can be sent again, but once the beacon is successfully sent, the beacon file is deleted immediately.

Best regards,

Jonathan