* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 10:32:02PM CEST: > At Thursday 24 June 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > Do you have an old system? > Well, it's not new :-) > > $ cat /proc/cpuinfo > model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+
> $ free | awk '(NR == 2) { print $2 }' > 774904 Hehe. model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.80GHz 1035964 The RAM upgrade helped wonders. > > What was > > the highest $try that you needed, 30 seems a bit excessive, no? > I preferred to err on the side of caution. After all, if the test > script works correctly, it exits much earlier than after 30 tries > (usually 1 try is enough). Also, I'm not expecting to see the bug it > looks for cropping up often, so even if the test takes 5 minutes in > the unlikely situation of a bug's reapperence, that's not a problem > IMHO. Agreed. > > I wonder what the current lower bound on PID reuse is on systems. > > There are certainly systems which use only 32K PIDs, and process > > creation can easily be thousand per second. I hope that 10 > > seconds are still safe. > I think that the possibility of a spurious failure here is very very > low. But I might be wrong, and it would fine by me having, say, 100 > tries every 3 seconds instead of 30 tries every 10 seconds. Your > call. Just to avoid a possible misunderstanding here: the issue I want to avoid is that we kill an unrelated process due to PID reuse. That would be ugly. Of course, 10 s is already better than 60 s. Oh well, let's just take your values for now. Cheers, Ralf