It took me a while to find out that LWP alarm() collides with the itimer. The reason for that behaviour was already clear.

Until now I do the killing of non-responding childs in the external watchdog, the files used for monitoring contain the pid of the corresponding process.

Solution #2 looks promising and I will look into that a bit further.

Thx && Rgds,
gnork

Edit: The error handling can always be improved, up to now I have one or two restarts a week for 50 instances of these servers in a very busy environment. I know, no restarts would be better... .