[Zope] Re: zope fork in external method

[Jonathan]

Pls keep your posts on the list  - so that others can help and so that 
others can search for problems/solutions!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Lopez" <dev101 at vivademocracy.com>
To: <dev101 at magma.ca>
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 12:13 PM
Subject: zope fork in external method


>
> Jonathan-
>
> I'm emailing you because I saw your post a few months back at:
>
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2006-May/166574.html
>
> I've been doing my best to find answers on existing posts, but to no 
> avail.  Perhaps you can send further pointers?
>
> On my system, a user can hit a page that initiates a long database query. 
> If the user hits the stop button and tries to refresh, it messes things up 
> (by interrupting the code upon return of the query), so I came up with a 
> solution that almost works:
>
> I put all the code into an external method, which forks.  The parent 
> returns a redirect to a "waiting" throbber page that uses Ajax to poll 
> whether the query is done.  The child then goes on to do the hard work.
>
> This is working as desired, with a single exception: zombie child 
> processes.  Where can I learn more about forking processes in zope 
> external methods?  I've read about the double-fork method, but that hasn't 
> resolved the problem...

A few ideas for reaping dead child processes:

1) implement a SIGCHLD handler

2) when a spawned child process is finished its 'zope processing' have it 
write its process id to a file (be careful when accessing files, you will 
need locking to eliminate problems that may be caused by zope's multiple 
threads) and then have a clean up routine which kills all of the processes 
listed in the file (this could be an independant clean-up routine which 
wakes up on a regular basis, or it could be built into the 'spawning' 
process which does the clean up before it spawns a child).

3) as the last thing it does, have the child process issue a kill -9 system 
command to kill its own process (I haven't tried this myself, but it may 
work and it would be simple to implement)

Good luck!

Jonathan