On 31-Mar-05, at 6:16 AM, Nick wrote:
As a refinement;
The timer firstly sends a signal to the CGI program which may be caught by the CGI program to generate some form of output. This output will prove whether the http connection is still open. If the CGI program doesn't output anything, a TERM is sent. If still no output and process is still running, a KILL is sent.
This seems overly complex to me, and furthermore a bit difficult to actually implement in a CGI. How is a CGI to know whether it is "hung"? If it could figure that out, it could kill itself easily enough, but I believe it to be a computationally intractable problem related to the halting problem; certainly it is not something I'd like to try in a bash script. :)
It seems to me that a simple timer would be sufficient; however, it would be nice to be able to configure individual CGIs (or directories of CGIs) with longer or shorter timers; I have seen instances of webapps with CGIs which compute for several minutes, or even longer. (Presumably, the users of such webapps are very patient or really need the results.)
Rici
