Hi all!


BACKGROUND ON PROBLEM / PAST ATTEMPTS:
I've been trying to do some inter process communication with perl on win32 to no avail. This is for a bot that is going to do indexing of web sites for a search engine. The current architecture is for ~805 concurrent processes (23 perl interpreters with 35 forked processes each) per box. This seems to be working without much of a dent to the resources, the only problem is doing the actual IPC. I've tried tcpip with a server process per each process but it isn't fast enough (can't leave the socket open or we over run the io::select limit per process), Win32::Pipe worked great until the HUGE memmory hole was found that filled up the 8GB commit charge cache secretly and brought the box down to it's knees.

CURRENT ATTEMPT / PROBLEM:
Now I'm trying to use perl's native "pipe" function which is supported in win32 perl. I can't seem to get it to fork off more than 2 processes without closing down the pipes, it seems to "block" after 2 processes. Any tips on how to get this to work / a better option?

Thanks for all your help in advance!

-Chris


TEST SCRIPT TO ILLUSTRATE PROBLEM:

# Example of pipe problem
# Useage: perl pipetest.pl 2
# $ARV[0] represents how many processes to fork off, run with 2 and it
+ will
# send a line of text from the main process and print it to STDOUT


pipe READ1, WRITE1;
pipe READ2, WRITE2;
pipe READ3, WRITE3;
pipe READ4, WRITE4;
pipe READ5, WRITE5;


for(1..$ARGV[0]) {
$forke++;
  my $pid;
  if($pid = fork) {
    # parent
    $| = 1;
    $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE';
    if ($forke == $ARGV[0]) {&server;}
    } else {
    $| = 1;
   # child
    die "cannot fork :$!" unless defined $pid;
print "Forked $forke\n";
for (;;) {

$read_pipe="READ$forke";
while (<$read_pipe>) {print "Child $forke: parent said \"$_\"\n"};

          }
}
}


sub server {
$t=0;
 for (1..5) {$t++;
   $write_pipe="WRITE$t";
   select($write_pipe);
   $|=1;
   print "TESTING 1 2 3\n";
      }
}
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