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Why does a child process die?

kerryfriesen

Hello,

I have a Perl script that creates 4 child processes, each of which copies a set of files to a different server. A situation happened the other day where one of the child processes terminated abnormally. What would be some factors that would cause a child process to die?

Any thoughts/comments would be most welcome.

Thanks,
Kerry

Environment:
RH Enterprise Linux 3
Perl 5.6.1

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Comments

Migrateduser

Wow, for any number of reasons. You'll need to be far more descriptive than that. Your question is just like asking someone, "Why would someone die?" without giving us any information other than they may have been wearing shoes at the time of death.

kerryfriesen

Hi Dave,

I didn't realize there would be so many reasons. The fact that I am new to working with code that handles multiple processes lead me to make this post.

At this point I don't really have any additional/specific information other than an error message stating that a process terminated abnormally.

The 3 other processes in the group ran sucessfully and the target server where the files were getting copied was also running correctly.

Could a high server load could cause a process to die? I'm just trying to understand what may have caused this problem.

Thanks,
Kerry

Migrateduser

- due to the compilation problem in the perl script.
- unexpected error during the execution of the perl script.
- someone killed the process.
- unable to connect to other server as that server might be down.
- the process never started.

Migrateduser

To add to what batasari mentioned,

- Too much memory being utilized
- Lock exists on a file that's trying to be accessed (more an issue on Unix)

... etc. There are many reasons this could happen and you'll need to do some debugging to find (1) where and then (2) why this occured.

nipper

is this repeatable ?

Is it the same script run for all four ?

Was there any login at all in the script ?

kerryfriesen

Hello Nipper,

Unfortunately, this is not repeatable as the script has been running fine for quite some time. The same script is used on many different servers and is run using a privliged account.

We know where (which server) this happened on, but are trying to determine why. I'm currently looking into suome of the suggestions from Dave and Batasari. Thanks everyone for your input.

Regards,
Kerry