Re: feature request: gzip/bzip support for sort

[Dan Hipschman]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 05:47:53PM -0800, Dan Hipschman wrote:
> That's a thought, although libz only works with gzip (as you said), and
> it will add more complexity (like my original patch using LZO and this
> new one combined).  I don't think we'll have 40 instances of gzip -d
> running.  We should only need at most one compression process, and
> NMERGE (16) decompression processes running at one time.  I think
> retrying fork if it fails is a good idea, and I've already added that
> since I read your mail.

Apologies, I spoke to soon.  We shouldn't have 40 *running* processes,
but we generate a lot of defunct ones.  I'm working on cleaning them up
sooner and then hopefully we can bound the number of child processes at
NMERGE + 1.