i'm building a networked app, and one request to a server takes 2-10 seconds, but since i need up to 100 replies from the server, i thought i'd use 100 children to get 100 replies all at the same time, but something isn't right and it gets pretty carried away sometimes. for the most part, this seems alright ran through a console, but accessing it via a browser attempts to kill the system.

i'd like the main sub to fork out as many children as needed, one for each search param, and collect all of the results and return them. each child really should return a value within 15 seconds or return bad. any help at all would be greatly appreciated, i've always been terrible at ipc.

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;
use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

unless ($cgi->param()) {
   print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
   print "<form action=$ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'}><input type=text name=test>
+<input type=submit></form>";
}

else {

   my $param = $cgi->param('test');
   my @patterns = find_patterns($param);   
   print Dumper( lookup(@patterns) );
}

#----------------------------------

sub lookup(@) {

BEGIN { unshift @INC, "/home/test/lib" }

use XML_Client qw(:default);
use Data::Dumper;

   $SIG{CHLD} = \&sig_chld;

   my @search = @_;

   my %return;
   my @spawn;
   my $XML_Client = new XML_Client();
   $XML_Client->login;

   use IO::Handle;
   pipe(READER, WRITER);
   #WRITER->autoflush(1);
   for (0..$#search) {
      my $pid = &child($search[$_], $XML_Client);
      push @spawn, $pid;
   }
   close WRITER;

   local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "timeout\n" };
   alarm 20;
   waitpid($spawn[-1],0);
   for (0..$#search-1) {
      my $feedback = <READER>;
      chomp $feedback;
      $return{$_} = $feedback;
   }
   alarm 0;

   return %return;

END { $XML_Client->logout if $XML_Client }

#-------------------------------

sub child($$) {
   my $search = shift;
   my $XML_Client = shift;

   my $return;
   unless (my $pid = fork) {
      close READER;
      local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "child timeout\n" };

      my $lookup_data = {
                     action => "lookup",
                     attributes => {
                        search => $search,
                     }
             };
      my $lookup_results;
      eval {
            local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "child timeout\n" };
            alarm 15;
            $lookup_results = $XML_Client->send_cmd( $lookup_data ) or
+ warn PROG $!;
            alarm 0;
         };
         if ($@) {
            #timed out
            die unless $@ eq "child timeout\n";
         }
     else {
               print WRITER $lookup_results->{status} . "\n";
        exit 1;
         }
    return $pid;
  }

#-----------------------------------

sub sig_chld {
   use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
   my $child = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG);
   $SIG{CHLD} = \&sig_chld;
}
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