First things first do you have code you can show us or some further information about what you are doing?

I was writing a program once to read from a FIFO created with mknod p filename. The writer was squid and the reader was a perl script doing manipulations with the data before doing some SQL updates. I found that the program writing to the pipe (Squid) died with SIGPIPE when the reader wasn't reading fast enough or there wasn't a reader at all. I basically had to modify the reader to be able to suck data out of the pipe as fast or faster then the program writing to the pipe since then I rewrote the reader to simplify the SQL it was performing so it handled the data even faster. _If_ I remeber properly the reader died to with SIGPIPE or EOF when there wasn't anything in the pipe. I have read you should always have more then one reader on a pipe. I can't remember where though.

I hope this is helpful in some way :-)