There are all kinds of problems that you'll encounter and have to solve if you fork. I found it's better to call at(1) to start another seperate process immediatly. If you need to pass data JSON worked really well for me.
-wjt On Aug 25, 2009 5:12 AM, "Victor Danilchenko" <vic...@askonline.net> wrote: Hi all, I need to be able to fork an Apache process in daemon form, to do some housekeeping which might potentially take a few seconds. However, when I do that, I start getting SQL errors (of the "connection lost" type) in the browser. I do the fairly standard cleanup to daemonize the child process, but of course it needs to retain the SQL socket open. Here is my forking code: sub modperl_kamikaze_fork () { # You will have to do CORE::exit(0) at the end of the execution. $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE'; get_m->flush_buffer; defined (my $kid = fork) or die "Cannot fork: $!\n"; return $kid if $kid; my $r = get_r; close STDIN; open STDIN, '/dev/null' or die "Can't read /dev/null: $!"; close STDOUT; open STDOUT, '>/dev/null' or die "Can't write to /dev/null: $!"; close STDERR; open STDERR, '>>/tmp/form.log' or die "Cannot open /tmp/fork.log\n"; setsid or die "Can't start a new session: $!"; my $oldfh = select STDERR; local $| = 1; select $oldfh; warn "Child (PID $$) spawned.\n"; $r->child_terminate; } The Apache2:Subprocess doesn't help me, because I need not to spawn an external process, but to finish processing in mod_perl context -- just without bugging the user with it. Any ideas on how to either fork better, or how to solve this without forking (e.g. is there a way to 'append' a function call to the request after the rest of the request is completed)? Many thanks in advance. -- Victor Danilchenko Senior Software Engineer, AskOnline.net vic...@askonline.net - 617-273-0119