Programming

i'm writing small http proxy server (accept client -> connect to remote proxy server -> recv client's request -> send to remote proxy server -> get responce from remote proxy server -> send answer to client -> close connection to client and to remote proxy server) and having problems with fork(). when connections come to local port, i'm forking them to process the request. but when there are many (100+) simaltenious connections, childs become to work slower and die in 2-20 seconds. i have no limits for simaltenious incoming connections. when child dies it sends SIGCHLD signal to the parent application, which has a handler:

static void sig_chld(int no) {
while (waitpid(-1, NULL, WNOHANG) > 0);
}

and a set up function:
static void install_sig_handlers(void) {
struct sigaction sig_act;

sig_act.sa_handler = sig_chld;
sig_act.sa_flags = 0;
sigfillset(&sig_act.sa_mask);
sigaction(SIGCHLD, &sig_act, NULL);

sig_act.sa_handler = SIG_IGN;
sig_act.sa_flags = 0;
sigemptyset(&sig_act.sa_mask);
sigaction(SIGPIPE, &sig_act, NULL);
}

this works fine on my FreeBSD 4.4 server for 1-100 simaltenious connections from clients. but it becomes wierd when 100+ connections come: zombies start leaving in memory and their number grows. after several minutes of work with 100+ connections server goes down with about 10000 zombies in memory and 0% cpu idle, and at the same time none of my processes (parent or childs) loads the server (by `ps -awx` results) - neither cpu, nor memory.

please help me to find correct decision for this problem. Thanx.

Probably the correct solution would involve a much more complex design. But here is something easily implemented that might be worth a try. This freebsd man page says that freebsd supports the System V sigcld sematics. So just turn on SA_NOCLDWAIT and then no zombies should ever exist.

Thnx for advice, but
neither first construction nor second work properly - zombies still continue to stay

1st:
sig_act.sa_handler = SIG_IGN;
sig_act.sa_flags = SA_NOCLDWAIT;
sigemptyset(&sig_act.sa_mask);
sigaction(SIGCHLD, &sig_act, NULL);


2nd:
sig_act.sa_handler = SIG_IGN;
sig_act.sa_flags = SA_NOCLDWAIT;
sigfillset(&sig_act.sa_mask);
sigaction(SIGCHLD, &sig_act, NULL);