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What is the Locomotive?

April 26, 2017locomotive

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What is the Locomotive?

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The Locomotive is a “server program”, which means that it listens on a TCP port for requests from clients. Once it starts running, it can handle requests forever, until you explicitly shut it down. You can run several Locomotive servers on your machine at once, to improve parallelization. The Locomotive is not part of the web server, nor does it require the web server to be running. In order for the web server to communicate with a Locomotive, the web server executes a program which serves as a tunnel between the web server and the Locomotive. A few different “tunnel” programs are provided, including a CGI program written in C, an NSAPI shared object, and an Apache module. Each of these can be configured to pass information on to multiple Locomotives. The locolink “tunnel” chooses which Locomotive to connect to based on random selection, or on the system CPU load. The tunnel provides you the freedom to run as many Locomotives on your system as you would like, on as many separate machin