Kernel Edgeplay

I'm building a little something something that spawns multiple
asynchronous processes, each of which maintains an independent dialog
with an external process. 

The main thread is a looping daemon that checks a status pipe for
messages from daemons it has spawned, pushes data out to any waiting
demons and spawns a new daemon child if there aren't any waiting for
data.

Each of the daemon children grabs data off an input pipe, does a merge
with a template supplied at creation, runs an SMTP conversation via a
telnet process to the local mail server and lets the parent know when
its ready for another record. Even with pipelining to a local mail
server the telnet process has to be watched:

#!/bin/sh
# cto.sh - Configurable Time Out
# $1 - PID to timeout
# $2 - Seconds to timeout
sleep $2s
kill $1

The child starts the telnet process and calls cto.sh asynchronously with
the PID whenever it polls the telnet process for a response. When telnet
returns data, the child kills the current cto.sh process.

The obvious problem here is that every child spawned off the main loop
is using 6 or 9 processes at any time. When you add in the processes
from the mail server that's 400-500 concurrent processes from this
application... assuming that I configure the MTA to enforce the same
limits on local connections that it applies to outside servers.

I have a little while to work on this, because the first version is
just going to dump the merged documents to the sendmail command, but I
do want to know if there's a better idiom for watching a process that
I'm missing coming at the problem like a shell script. Also, if there's
room to tweak syscall to do this housekeeping since you're already
wrapping the external process when you do an asynchronous call that
would be Godiva.

Chris

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