I've found that the Cookbook code for dealing with SIGCHLD seems to be a bit unreliable (See $? is -1???). As best I could ever figure, despite documentation to the contrary, it appeared that the signal handling didn't actually handle reentrancy correctly.

However, I think you could get rid of the signal handler and just do something like replace

# And maintain the population.
while (1) {
    sleep;                          # wait for a signal (i.e., child's
+ death)
    for ($i = $children; $i < $PREFORK; $i++) {
        make_new_child();           # top up the child pool
    }
}
[download]

with

# And maintain the population.
while ((my $pid = waitpid(-1)) > 0) {
  $children--;
  delete $children{$pid};
  make_new_child()
}
[download]

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