popen takes too long?

I'm writing a program to check whether servers are still alive. So I'm executing the ping command with popen, to make sure my program isn't blocked during the ping and I can execute a lot of pings in parallel. The problem however is that sometimes the popen command is blocked for a while and it takes seconds before it is executed.

Here's the popen part of my program:

Code:

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strcpy(command,"ping -c 1 -w 1 ");
strcat(command,IpAddress);
M_fp = popen(command,"r");

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I think it has something to do with a maximum open child processes or so, because this happens only when there are a lot of pings going on. Anybody an idea why this takes sometimes so long?

Is there a function to retrieve the number of open child processes?

> to make sure my program isn't blocked during the ping and I can execute a lot of pings in parallel.
So you've just managed to DoS yourself, what do you want from us?

Maybe find another way to solve your problem?

I'm doing something like 20 pings each second, so it's not that my server can't handle that.

I would just like to know what the reason can be that sometimes popen takes a few seconds to execute.

And I'd like to know how I can retrieve the number of open child processes