I found that every once in a while, my Apache server would give server errors on
all CGIs - ones that previously worked. The error message in the log was: [Mon Jan 19 16:12:24 1998] [error] (24)Too many open files: couldn't spawn child
process: c:/apache/cgi-pts/foo.pl

I found that I could reproduce this error using the "torture" Perl program found
in the latest version of The Perl Journal, and hitting a Perl cgi program a few
hundred times in quick succession. The "torture" program hits a give URL and appends random data into the
QUERY_STRING to test the server's tolerance. I am aware of the bug that causes
server errors if the QUERY_STRING does not contain an = sign, so I made sure
that there was always one in there so that I was not causing that bug to show
up. The torture program was called with the following syntax:

torture -l 50 -t 1000 http://pts.databeam.com/cgi-bin/foo.pl\?foo=bar

-l 50 means append up to 50 characters of random data. -t 1000 means do it 1000 times.

After a few hundres iterations, the CGI program starts returning 500 errors, and
the log shows the "too many open files" message.

The program that I am using is simplitity itself -

#!/perl/bin/perl print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; print "<h1>Foo</h1>";

Aquire "torture.pl" from
http://orwant.www.media.mit.edu/tpj/programs/Issue_8_CGI/ Write a CGI program as shown in my description. sic torture on it a few thousand times. I found that it does OK for a little
while, and then rolls over and dies after a few hundred accesses, indicating
that this is a gradual process, and we have to work up to whatever limit we are
hitting.

Blame it on MicroSoft? It seems that perhaps the CGI process is not releasing either the script file or
the Perl interpreter. (?%2

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