I don't have experience with alarm(), and given that "Use them at your own risk" quote, I don't think I'm going to investigate it either. What I do have experience with, is processing long-running jobs. The general approach I use is to have the web interface kick off a batch job, which runs separate from Apache.

I happen to use a POE daemon, and track batch jobs through a table in MySQL. The web interface polls this table at regular intervals, and displays the progress (or the end-result) to the user. The POE daemon can process many jobs concurrently (through POE::Component::JobQueue and POE::Wheel::Run).

The advantage of that approach is that both sides are decoupled, and that you have detailed control over the resource consumption.

Update: Maybe you could make use of Apache2::SubProcess. That looks like a safe way to fork under mod_perl.

In reply to Re: mod_perl, prefork mpm and alarms by rhesa
in thread mod_perl, prefork mpm and alarms by talexb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.