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Magnanimous Monks, myriad musings mottle my moody mind. Maybe many mighty mentors might minister me memorable motions mending my malady? (I've been waiting to post that for months - alliteration is dorky but *fun!*) :)

OK, here's what I came for:

I have a program that forks off a pile of long-running children. Actually, the child processes should probably *never* return or die, in normal operation.

The code I've already written (simplified version below in the readmore section) simply reports info about dead children to a log, but now I need to do more...

The calls to fork are done inside a loop that looks like this:

my %child_info;
foreach my $params (@params_for_children)
{
    if ( my $pid = fork() ) 
    {
        $child_info{$pid} = $params;
    }
    else 
    {
        do_childish_things($params);
        croak "Child fork exited - should never happen\n";
    }
}

while ( my $pid = wait() ) 
{
    last if $pid = -1;
    my $exit_status = $?;
    report_dead_child($pid, $exit_status, $child_info{$pid});
}
[download]

Generally, this works very well, but there are some things I need to add and I'm somewhat uncertain about how I would best go about it.

SO... I need advice with the following requirements:

If a child dies, a new one needs to be spawned, with the same parameters as it's predecessor, but not immediately - there should be about a 1 min delay.
If a child dies twice within a short period (say 5 min) it should be restarted after a longer (say 10 min) delay.
If a child dies X number of times, the parent should do some pre-defined action (like emailing me) and give up on that child.
These delays should not cause the parent to miss opportunities to revive other dead children
If the parent is terminated, all the children need to die with it.

My main question is this:

Is the code above a bad way for me to do this?
and,
Should I continue writing my own solution(s) or is there a robust CPAN module that will do this for me with less hassle?

In reply to Keeping children alive persistiently, intelligently by Hercynium

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