Validate server availability with utl_tcp

Question

Hi,
I'm using plsql code to process a request and send back a valid URL (some kind of Load Balancing between two hosts). For example, one asks for an Oracle Forms Server and the database could return any of those two servers : http://host1.domain.local/forms/frmservlet?config=x and http://host2.domain.local/forms/frmservlet?config=x. The thing is I need to validate that the host is reachable before return it back to the user.
I tried with utl_tcp.open_connection and UTL_HTTP.begin_request (which I supposed is using utl_tcp) but if a server is down the timer will expired only after 20 seconds which is way to long for the user. Is there any way in PL/SQL to open a connection and timeout after 2 or 3 seconds or to ping a server ? If not I think I'll create a JAVA class.
Thank you
Francis

Answer 1

Well... You could have a background process that checks every second and then updates a table with a timestamp and then have the foreground process check the timestamp and if it is > some number of seconds then assume that it is not as available as you want it to be.
But loadbalancing middlewhere by using the DB seems to be the wrong way... Doesn't Oracle Forms Server let you do a round robin loadbalancing with detecting down nodes? Or have the DNS server do it or something like that.