Ok... so we use FCGI, and I hate it, since when we have problems I can't track them down. SO... I am writing a perl version. Not that that is terribly important.

What is important is that I have a server process, which manages multiple children listening to the same socket. To keep track of these children and decide if I need to fork more or reap a few, I have two way pipes that talk to a master process, saying when they get a call and when they are done with a call.

My problem is that I have all the child read pipes in IO::Select, and occasionally (easy to duplicate if the waiting message quickly follows the call message) I lose the waiting message. Basically I have one line messages, so can_read returns, I get the 'call' message, then I return. The 'waiting' message may already be there, but I leave that for the next cycle for can_read to pick up again. However, it doesn't always get picked up.

Any ideas? Am I going about this the wrong way? I tested and found the 'waiting' message was actually there. I had assumed that if I didn't read everything from the socket that can_read would return true until there was nothing left to read... am I wrong. Or am I possibly not using the proper read method? Maybe perl is doing some weird buffering when I use $msg = scalar <$cr>; ?

Of course, if anyone has suggestions on how better to track when the children are in a call I'm open to that, too... I don't know if there is any way to tell how many children are listening on a socket or something similar.

Below is a snippet of the code:

    
     for(0..1) {        
        my @ready = $self->{root}{select}->can_read(0);
        for(@ready) {
$self->handle_child_message($self->{root}{childreads}{$_},$_);
        }
    }


sub handle_child_message {
    my $self = shift;
    my $child = shift;
    my $cr = shift;

    my $msg = <$cr>;
    if($msg =~ /^call/) {
        $self->{root}{busy}{$child} = 1;
        $self->{root}{busycount}++;
        $self->{root}{children}{$child}{calls}++;
    } elsif($msg =~ /^waiting/) {    
        $self->{root}{busycount}-- if delete $self->{root}{busy}{$chil
+d};    
    }
}
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