I have noticed a resource problem in LilyPond, namely invocation of
the "Compile/Typeset file" command in interactive mode always
consumes one more pid. When I enter music, I incrementally compile
it as I go. I do my work on a Mac running OS 10.4. There are a
fixed number of pids available for all the programs running on the
Mac. This means that as I continue to incrementally compile in
LilyPond, the number of available pids grows less, eventually
running out.
If LilyPond were a C program, this behavior could be caused by
executing an "exec" call to generate a child process but not later
waiting for the child to complete. This means that when the child
process does complete, it becomes what is called a zombie or
defunct pid. I suspect something similar is happening in LilyPond.
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