A program that crashes, especially in a mod_perl or FastCGI environment can cause all kinds of unexpected mayhem and sometimes the effects to "contain" the damage may even be worse or increase the damage. By its very nature a "crash" is uncontrolled and it is anybody's guess what will be its ill effects. It is not always possible to fully clean-up a crash: unreachable memory, zombie processes or runaway processes may remain at large despite our best efforts.

Many years ago (I think it was in one of the Apache 1 versions), there was even an option to bring down the whole server at regular intervals and "reboot" it, just to clean up all accumulated junk and even now there is still a possibility to kill individual Apache worker processes after a certain number of uses.

The windows OS was particularly prone to it, but regularly doing "reboots" during quiet times seemed to avoid the worst effects. The only problem was trying to sell this "solution" to the head of IT as a "feature" rather than a kludge to deal with badly written software.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics

In reply to Re: CGI::Fast / Apache - Strange behaviour? by CountZero
in thread CGI::Fast / Apache - Strange behaviour? by DreamT

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