Running without supervisord leaks memory

Okay first off, just to clear that up - THIS IS AWESOME! :) Just watching the tasks get fired away like this is great and feels good.

Now, I have a problem: in lenny, the supervisor package doesn't exist. I know, I know, I need to upgrade, but that means PHP 5.3, and we're not quite there yet. So I need to find an alternative. One thing I thought of was to just let it run without restarting it.

But this means it gets in the dreaded "PHP leaks memory" problem:

Starting Hosting queue runner, watching for available tasks [1.23 sec, 44.54 MB]                                                                                                                                                       [notice]
Found task to execute. Pausing before execution. [2.08 sec, 47.24 MB]                                                                                                                                                                  [notice]
[...] running tasks for 3 minutes
Finished executing task. [56.58 sec, 48.32 MB]                                                                                                                                                                                         [notice]

Roughly, 1MB / 3 minutes running tasks fully. In fact, every time a task is ran, PHP eats a whopping 100KB.

This sucks, but it's not this modules fault.

However, there may be something that can be done without reverting to using an external daemon (and requiring root). Something like Drupal's batch API (but we can't use that since it relies on Apache and so on).

A very simple thing would be to have a timer that, when it fires, the task execs itself. exec(), or pcntl-exec() as PHP mistakenly calls this noble function call, would be pretty much all we need.

Then the only thing we need to deal with are PHP segfaults, which maybe we can assume won't happen. Or we can have a crontab that will restart the daemon if it's dead.

In other words, what I am proposing is to patch this daemon to be self-restarting instead of relying on a third party to do that.

How does that sound?