[Openmcl-devel] Confused about processes

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

A couple of days ago I rewrote the bulk mailing functionality of our 
web application into a seperate process, so that the mailing is spread 
over 12 hours (to save bandwidth afterwards when people start reading 
the HTML mail ;-).

So what I do is spawn a process from the paserve handler that splits 
the job in 12 parts, sleeping for 1 hour in between and then ends: 
progress is reported by sending email to a specified email address. As 
far as I can tell, everything went fine: all test mails and 
confirmation mails were sent.

The debugging web app shows the following process listing:

(#<PROCESS execute-mailing(22) [exhausted] #x55A6946>
  #<PROCESS execute-mailing(20) [exhausted] #x5585D1E>
  #<PROCESS aserve-accept-12(19) [input-wait] #x557EA7E>
  #<PROCESS 11-aserve-worker(18) [Stopped] #x557E956>
  #<PROCESS 10-aserve-worker(17) [Stopped] #x557E82E>
  #<PROCESS 9-aserve-worker(16) [Running] #x557E70E>
  #<PROCESS 8-aserve-worker(15) [Stopped] #x557E5FE>
  #<PROCESS 7-aserve-worker(14) [Stopped] #x557E4DE>
  #<PROCESS session-reaper(10) [Sleeping] #x54FD00E>
  #<PROCESS remote-repl-server(9) [input-wait] #x54F8CF6>
  #<PROCESS auto-flush-log-stream(8) [Sleeping] #x54F8BAE>
  #<PROCESS external-process-watchdog(1) [Arrested] #x5296B5E>
  #<PROCESS Initial(0) [Sleeping] #x50C8D5E>)

Both 'execute-mail' process are ended but are still in an 'exhausted' 
state - as far as I understand my own code, the function that was the 
body of the process returned. What does this state mean ? Why is the 
process still there ?

I tried to recreate this problem in a listener, but failed to do that - 
since the server is (of course) still running, I can go in and try to 
inspect the process, but I don't know what I should look for. Any ideas 
?

Thx in advance,

Sven