I have a process that polls for files and forks a child process to handle each file as it arrives. The problem is that sometimes it waits for the child to exit before moving on to the next. This seems to happen when processing the larger files.

For the proper way to reap children, consult perlman:perlipc. The section on "Signals" is near the top of the document, and describes how to set up a SIGCHLD handler to correctly account for the death of a child process.

If you don't handle SIGCHLD correctly, you could be getting blocked on wait().

In reply to Re: fork()ing a large process by dws
in thread fork()ing a large process by Jonathan

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