RE: [PHP] How reliable is pcntl support?

Good day, Thanks for your reply. > > I've recently had a need to write a standalone script that > > needs to fork off > a number of children during its operation, > If by children you mean server processes or OS processes you > may be able to > use exec() or one of it's variations; I had considered trying to use something like exec(), but it would have to be written a lot differently. Perhaps the group could give some suggestions? I need to write a rrdtool front-end that will query a series of hosts and collect information so that graphs can be created for them. All of the information I need is in LDAP, which I've already written neat little functions to retrieve them and process the hosts and "services" which represents the graphs. So, the program needs to get the information out of LDAP, collect the data sources for rrdtool for each graph (for those not familiar with it, rrdtool doesn't collect the information for you) and then call rrdtool to update the graphs and create the graph files for new graphs, if necessary. Now, a single-threaded process wouldn't be able to poll all of the graphs in time (most of the time is spent waiting for all of the SNMP replies), so I'd like to have the main program fork off children to actually perform the work. At least, that's the best way I can think of to do it. The only way I can think of do this without forking is to start up completely separate processes that do the polling, and somehow have them independently figure out which hosts/graphs in LDAP that it has been "assigned" to poll. I wrote something similar in Perl for MRTG a couple of years ago that had a MySQL backend, but after using rrdtool I am not going back to MRTG. =) Perl would work nicely for what I want to do, but a lot of it is already done in PHP and it would sure be nice to share includes between the two applications. There's the program. What would people suggest? ============================ Darren Gamble Planner, Regional Services Shaw Cablesystems GP 630 - 3rd Avenue SW Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 4L4 (403) 781-4948