I have a customized templating system I wrote to do language translations using mod_perl to filter every page using xml files for the words. It works well, and I even figured out how to make it handle server-side includes such as embedded php.

However, it appears that anytime my mod_perl running as a Apache::Filter handler runs the PHP it has a disturbing tendency to create little PHP zombies that never go away until the http server gets too many of them and then has to be restarted.

Here is the relevant code: 

    if($content =~ /\<\?php (.*?)\?\>/s) {
    $scrap = $1 . "\n";
    $ENV{REDIRECT_STATUS} = "dummy status";
    $ENV{REDIRECT_URL} = $ENV{SCRIPT_URI};
    $ENV{REDIRECT_URI} = $ENV{SCRIPT_URI};
    $ENV{REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING} = $ENV{QUERY_STRING};
    open2(\*PHPOUT,\*PHPIN,"php -q 2>&1") or log_error("Rotary::Transl
+ations: Unable to open php pipe. Reason: $!\n");
    print PHPIN $scrap;
    close(PHPIN);
    my $line;
    while($line = <PHPOUT>) {
        if( $line eq "Content-type: text/html\n") {
            next;
        }
        $newcontent .= $line;
    }
    close(PHPOUT);
    $content = "";
    }

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I do close the pipe, so what more do I need to do to make it release the zombie?

In reply to Perl Web Zombie problem by bivansc

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