This is a totally wild guess, so please feel free to throw rocks at my head if I'm wrong.

Is it OK to open a file and then write to it from forked children and then close it from the parent? It seems to me that you'd get all kinds of horrible problems with multiple children trying to write at the same time... Maybe SDBM has a locking system and the parent process holds the lock? That would cause what you're seeing.

I think you need some kind of IPC to organize everyone so they don't step on eachother while writing to the data base file.

If I were doing this, first I'd seriously reconsider the value of forking off those children. If this were only one process without the forking it would be way easier. If I decided that I really needed that higher performance, I'd use threads with queues (Thread::Queue). I don't know what the equivalent to thread queues in a forking system is, but maybe that'd be easier.

Threads aren't really any harder than forking, in my experience.

See: perlthrtut, perlipc, Thread::Queue

In reply to Re: Apache log piped to Perl by pileofrogs
in thread Apache log piped to Perl by Anonymous Monk

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