Re: [Chicken-users] process-wait

[Alan Post]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 10:02:18AM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
>    Hello,
>    > ***** Message sent: 01 Sep 2011 14:16:44 +0200 *****
>    > For quite some time I've been wondering why my app runs only about
>    > twice as fast on chicken compared to rscheme (given the benchmark
>    > style performance of chicken code).
>    > strace was my friend to pin this down to process-wait. From the
>    > manual: "Suspends the current process...Note that suspending the
>    > current process implies that all threads are suspended as well."
>    > Too bad, my app spent it's time waiting for irrelevant processes,
>    > not running useful threads as I'd like it to.
>    > This shouldn't be too hard to fix, I thought - and wrote the code
>    > I'll paste and comment. (With the intention that this might
>    > go into the posix unit eventually.) Once the issues I have are
>    > resolved, that is. However those are harder than I expected:
>    > (Side note: even with bad the code here my app feels much
>    > better, since the "coughing" is gone.)
>    ...
>    > The idea is to convert (process-wait pid #f) into
>    > (process-wait pid #t) and block the current tread only
>    > when the first result is zero.
>    Sounds indeed frustrating. I've run across similar problems while writing
>    a multitasking web server. It uses process-fork to create child processes
>    which handle the client requests. Under Linux, the parent may wait, or
>    not, for the child to finish, If not, the child doesn't "go away"--it's a
>    "zombie"--until the parent ends, unless the default signal handler flags
>    are set to a NOWAIT value.

If NOWAIT is not yes, you need to capture the SIGCHLD signal and
call waitpid(2) (or a related function) to collect the exit status
of a terminated child process.  A "zombie" process is one which is
terminated but is storing this information for the parent process.

So, what you say is true.  :-)

-Alan
-- 
.i ma'a lo bradi cu penmi gi'e du