jamesrleu,

Sounds like some of your frustration has been alleviated -- good!

Here's some code you can put in the parent to test the expanding size of the children. You may want to verify that VSZ and RSS are the same for your system. Use 'man ps' and it should tell you the definitions.

    ...
    my ($mem1,$mem2) = &Display_Mem_Usage($child[$no],$NAME,0);
    if ( $mem1 > 0 )
    {  my $diff1 = $mem1 - $pmem1; my $diff2 = $mem2 - $pmem2; 
       if ( $diff1 > $max_virtual ) { ... }  # kill the child
       elsif ( $diff2 > $max_real ) { ... }  # kill the child
    }
    ...


sub Display_Mem_Usage
{   # VSZ is size in KBytes of the virtual memory ( VSZ * 1024 )
    # RSS is size in pages of real memory ( 1024 * RSS )
    my $cpid = shift; my $name = shift;
    my $from = shift;                ## Not used here, but in some scr
+ipts
    my $var = ""; my $fh;

    if ( ! ( kill 0 => $cpid ) )     ## Check that pid is active
        {    return ( -1, -1 );
        }
    my $arg = qq| -o "vsz rssize" -p $cpid|;
    ##  make sure you specify the full path to 'ps' command
    open ( $fh, "-|", "/bin/ps $arg" ) or die "Prefork: Not open \'$ar
+g\': $!";
    while (<$fh>)
        { $var .= $_; }
    close $fh;
    my $rno = my @ref = split(/\n/,$var);
    if ( $rno < 2 ) { return ( -1, -1 ); }
    my $info = join(" ", split " ", $ref[1]);
    my ($vmem,$rmem) = ( split(/\ /,$info) );
    return ( $vmem , $rmem );
 }
[download]

If you decide to use this code, only call the subroutine from the parent. In AIX it worked for both the parent and children, but in Linux it would hang after 4-5 hours. Must have some type of race condition, but you don't really need to call it from the children. To use it properly you call the sub after creating the child and save the returned sizes ($pmem1/2) in an array or hash. This way you can track the children and make sure they don't exceed your predetermined max sizes.

For killing the children, I usually send 'ABRT' first, and then if the child still exists I send '-9' on the second pass. On the 3rd pass, if the child still exists, I email the system admin, and shutdown and restart the whole process. It has never happened so far, but you have to prepare for worst cases.

Good Luck...Ed