Look, once you are willing to do this, what else comes up?

I mean, looping over a failing call to fork() is causing how much more
harm than looping over any one of 500 or so other calls that you could
loop over? What's next, something to stop you from looping over
ioctl() or getpid()? If you want to bring down a timesharing machine,
you can find lots of ways. Meanwhile, this trick is causing trouble.

How about we surround your half second delay code with an option that
someone like you can turn on if they want it and we be done with this
discussion?

Perry

Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@netbsd.org> writes:
> Roland Dowdeswell wrote:
> > I do not buy this, and have presented one example where this is
> > not the case.  thttpd neither busy loops on fork(), nor exits on
> > fork() failure.  I am guessing that inetd, sshd, etc. probably fall
> > into the same boat of neither busy-looping nor exiting.
> 
> Yes, I realized this when I actually checked what thttpd does.
> It logs the error condition, returns error to client and proceeds
> to next request. So, no busy loop, just return failure. This is
> indeed what daemons generally do.
> 
> You are also right that e.g. inetd is in the same boat, tho IIRC
> inetd does some connection throttling (allows only 100 per second?).
> 
> > The reason
> > that I chose thttpd off the top of my head was that it is a program
> > that performs work in a hybrid event-driven/fork model and hence
> > it is easy to see that arbitrarily enforced sleeps will cause it
> > to behave in unexpected fashions.  I am sure that there are other
> > examples.
> 
> I guess it's arguable what's the best behaviour in overload condition.
> 
> I agree that thttpd 'no more CGI if cannot fork' is about as
> sensible as it can get. Since it doesn't fork for static pages, this
> works fine for it.
> OTOH, it still seems to be not right that thttpd would spawn
> potentially unbound number of children with no way to control
> the number besides resource limits.
> 
> Jaromir
> -- 
> Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.org/
> -=- We should be mindful of the potential goal, but as the tantric    -=-
> -=- Buddhist masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you -=-
> -=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''     -=-
> 

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com