orphaned CGI programs

[Adam Sussman <my...@vidya.com>]

I have a CGI program which often takes a long time to complete.  It is not
unusal for this program to excede the script timeout value I have sepcified
in the httpd.conf file.  The server uses the hard_timeout mechanism to recover
from the timeout and kill the connection to the client.  Unfortunatly, it does
not take into account the process that was spawned by the server and leaves
it running.  I would much rather have the server kill the child process than
leave it running.  It is feasible to build this ability into the timeout
code and are there any reasons not to?

thanks,

Adam Sussman
Vidya Media Ventures