[sathya]
tim thanks for confirming it. Wont loose sleep over it now. I did not mean to sound like questioning anybodys track record.
No, it didn't sound like you were. I mentioned that Dieter has an excellent track record because *I'm* giving him a hard time here <wink>. I'm sure he's seeing problems, but I'm frustrated by the lack of concrete information about how they were provoked and on which kind of system.
Since we have ZEO clusters in production it raised alarm bells thats all. Its good to know the problem MAY occur only if u fork in your own app code
A potential problem is that Unixish systems typically fork "under the covers" for things that look utterly harmless to an application writer -- like the os.system() and os.popen() Dieter mentioned. fork()ing can create horrible problems for threaded applications (which is essentially *why* POSIX only clones the thread calling fork() -- that creates problems too, but the POSIX spec I referenced before discusses all this, so I won't repeat it here).
and the core zeo/zope code by itself is not contributing to it.
I don't think they are, but there's still not enough info here to say for sure.
I guess as a general rule of thumb its not a good idea to use forks in zope application or product code anyway (unless you know what you are doing.)
A more general rule of thumb is to avoid forking a threaded application of any kind. It's easy to follow that rule on OSes that don't have fork <cough>, but unfortunately tricky to avoid on those that do have fork.