waste of resources ?

[Arne Mueller]

Arne Mueller wrote:
> 
> Hi All
> 
> In my program I always get an OSError number 11 (Resource temporarely
> not available). It reads in lots of files using child processes
> communication with the parent. Each child also uses popen to get data
> from lauched 'gunzip' process. After ~1000 processed files the program
> raises OSError[11]. I'm pretty sure that all the child processes close
> their pipes to the parent and that popen is also closed. The parent
> stores the file descriptors connected to the children in a list but uses
> the lists 'remove' method to delete descriptors that are finished (those
> which the parent has already read from).
> 
> However, I'd like to get sure that's not the number of used
> filedescriptors what's causing the error. How can I examine the cause of
> error, I mean is there a python method or a variable that tell you the
> number of currently used file descriptors or better that lists all the
> resources a program is using including it's children?

I think I found the source of error:

Im running python 1.5.2b2 on SGI power challange irix64 version 6.5.
Everytime a child process is created via fork(), it realy does it's job
but never dies, instead the number of zombie processes (as reported by
the 'top' program) steadily increases, though I call the sys.exit(0)
method for the child. Any idea how exit a process without creating a
zombie?

	thanks alot,

	Arne