Re: pid leakage in LilyPond

[James Bailey]

On 01.02.2010, at 21:27, Patrick Karl wrote:

> I have noticed a resource problem in LilyPond, namely invocation of  
> the "Compile/Typeset file" command in interactive mode always  
> consumes one more pid.  When I enter music, I incrementally compile  
> it as I go.  I do my work on a Mac running OS 10.4.  There are a  
> fixed number of pids available for all the programs running on the  
> Mac.  This means that as I continue to incrementally compile in  
> LilyPond, the number of available pids grows less, eventually  
> running out.
>
> If LilyPond were a C program, this behavior could be caused by  
> executing an "exec" call to generate a child process but not later  
> waiting for the child to complete.  This means that when the child  
> process does complete, it becomes what is called a zombie or  
> defunct pid.  I suspect something similar is happening in LilyPond.
>
>
> _______________________________________________

Excuse my ignorance, but what is this about a fixed number of pids  
available for all the programs? I run lilypond in a terminal and call  
it from the command line. After issuing the "lilypond" command, top  
shows lilypond, then sh, then gs, then all of them exit. Subsequent  
lilypond commands just increase the pid as they go along. I just  
restarted my computer yesterday, but shortly before I did, I noticed  
that the pid's were in the 20,000 range. I would assume that they  
just keep counting up, but then, I've not had a problem with zombie  
processes, at least, not from lilypond or gs.