Forking in all its glory.

[dman666]

Greatings everyone.  I have an issue with forks.  What I am trying to accomplish is writing to an rrd database (arround 20000 entries) via the following php script.  I have never used forks before and it seems that my rrd is not graphing.  When I run a top on my gentoo linux box while I run this script I see a lot of defunct programs, but when my script finishes it says that the child exited gracefully.  I don't know whats going on I hope you guys can help. 

 

If the code executes incorrectly and spawns a zombie process will linux just distroy the zombie or allow it the finish?

 

Heres what I am trying to work with.  this is from an Object that holds and polls snmp info.

 

function somefunc

{

                $pid = array();

                //Using ID's grabbed from snmp poll as array id's

                foreach($this->LUID as $esn=>$id)

                {

                        //Spawn new process

                        $pid[$id] = pcntl_fork();

                        if($pid[$id])

                        {

                                //display process info

                                #print "Process forked ".$pid[$id]."\n";

                        }

                        else if($pid[$id] ==-1)

                        {}

                        else

                        {

                                //Run child

                                //this process returns an array of information from the snmp client

                                $temp = $this->walk($id);

                                print_r ($temp);

                                //iterate and write to file

                                foreach($temp as $key=>$data)

                                {

                                        //writes to file

                                        $rrd = new objRRD($esn, $key, constant("rrd_path"), $this->name);

                                        $rrd = $rrd->update_rrd($data);

                                }

                                //exit the current script

                                exit();

                        }

                }

                foreach($this->LUID as $esn=>$id)

                {

                        //wait until the child is done.  This is to handle flow control

                        pcntl_waitpid($pid[$id], &$status);

                        //display completion

                        print $pid[$id]." complete.\n";

                }

}