Would this problem be any different in a normal CGI context with the
program doing forks? I don't imagine it would be, which is why I see
the ultimate wisdom in spawning an external program to handle
long-running tasks, or just cron something.
Oh well, live and learn.
Tosh
William T wrote:
Caveat Lector:
Long Cleanups done inline on the Apache children can cause problems.
If you get a situation where the CleanUp takes to long OR you get
enough traffic to the page(s) which engage the CleanUp then you will
encounter a tipping point, and soon after your website will be almost
completely unavailable. This will occur because the Apache Children
aren't processing requests fast enough to handle the rate at which the
come in; because they are busy in CleanUp.
The reason I bring this up is encountering the failure is usually a
catastrophic event. The website is almost always entirely down, and
workarounds can be hard to come by.
This may or may not apply to you depending on your traffic
characteristics and how long your cleanup takes, BUT it is something
you should be aware of.
-wjt
--
McIntosh Cooey - Twelve Hundred Group LLC - http://www.1200group.com/
