My question is which way is more resourceful? Is it good for the children to die and re-spawn like that or would it be better to have them stay alive forever until forced to die and maintain their own set of code?

This depends on what your children are doing, and what their memory usage patterns are. Perl does garbage collect, but it does so within a memory arena that grows but never shrinks. You might find that you need to kill and re-spawn your child processes just to be resource friendly.

This problem appears in a number of different forms, and many words have been written on how to write servers that pre-spawn (and recycle) their children. The Perl Cookbook devotes part of a chapter to it, and merlyn has written several Web Techniques articles that cover that ground.

In reply to Re: Have children maintain themselves or main script maintain children. by dws
in thread Have children maintain themselves or main script maintain children. by the_0ne

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