Hi Ara

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 23:03 +0900, ara.t.howard / noaa.gov wrote:
> so, in effect, this is a Timeout::timeout based on a child process?

Yes, except that when the timeout expires, it triggers an action by the
watchcat daemon (which by default SIGKILLs the process).

> look handy for some of the work i'm doing now - which is a 24x7 satellite
> ingest system which spawns many processes which can potentially hang...

Our main use for it is in a shared hosting environment. We wrote a
mod_watchcat for apache2 and use watchcatd to kill misbehaving customer
scripts (that has helped increasing our servers' uptime a lot). When I
wrote the extension, my idea was to use it for something similar, maybe
with Mongrel, but I guess it would be useful for your satellite
application too :)

Regards,
Andre