Thread: sockets and child processes

if I accept a socket, and then fork and handoff the connection to the child, then the child terminates, and closes the socket, is the socket still open in the parent? I think this may be the source of my problems with not being able to accept a socket after the server has been running for a while.

Yes. If the socket descriptor is created prior to fork(), then both the parent and child must call close() to prevent the descriptor from being leaked.

If you are running out of file descriptors, you can check "/proc/[id]/fd" to see if open socket descriptors are listed there. If they are, you should see them growing

gg

Originally Posted by Codeplug

Yes. If the socket descriptor is created prior to fork(), then both the parent and child must call close() to prevent the descriptor from being leaked.

If you are running out of file descriptors, you can check "/proc/[id]/fd" to see if open socket descriptors are listed there. If they are, you should see them growing

gg

I found that on my production servers, they are chewing up FDs left and right, and on my dev server, where I am now running a thread to reclaim the FDs, the number of FDs in use with no clients connected is 7. I create several connections, and close them, and the number goes back to 7. so I think I got it fixed.

thanks for the help.