News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What Were CGI Scripts?. Parent comment

Re:What Were CGI Scripts? by rwbaskette on Sunday July 21, 2019 @09:21PM (#20494771)
I think one of the overlooked things of the process-per-request CGI scripts we ran back in the day is how you might run out of PIDs. I remember this happening once, but I think(50/50) it was because the PID was a 16-bit value at the time and the system and an uptime of about 6 months.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What Were CGI Scripts? by charliesome on Sunday July 21, 2019 @10:33PM (#20495013)
PIDs will recycle rather than exhausting. As an aside, that's also the reason why it's unsafe to use a PID from any process other than the parent process. As soon as the parent calls wait(2), the PID is released and could be reused for a fresh process at any moment.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What Were CGI Scripts? by JJMcJ on Monday July 22, 2019 @09:48PM (#20503818)
The only way to run out of PIDs is not wait() properly, leading to zombie processes, or else some CGI processes time out and don't exit, so never reaped by a wait().
[ Parent | on HN ]