I have written some test code (on RedHat7.3 this time - just got home from work :-) and no matter what value I use for Listen, the server keeps accepting (and queueing) connections. I will try this on Tru64 UNIX tonight to see if it in an OS issue as fokat suggests.

However on the bright side, the test code has proved that even if the server preforks a number of children, the queue is always shared between them (again, ++fokat for confirming this). So if there is one server processing a very time consuming request, incoming connections will not 'get stuck' behind it if other servers finish their jobs first (my original thought was that each child might have it's own queue).

So how can the parent process tell how many children are idle (then new ones could be forked if this falls below a preset limit)?

JJ