alarm 30;
$|=1;

## Choose operating system

BEGIN {
  if (($^O eq 'MSWin32') || defined($ENV{'OS'})) {
    $operatingsystem = 0;
    $operatingsystemoldnt = 0;
    $systempath = "$ENV{'PATH_TRANSLATED'}";
    $systempath =~ s/(\\[a-z0-9]*\.pl)$//g;
    unless ($systempath) {
      $systempath = "$ENV{'SCRIPT_FILENAME'}";
      $systempath =~ s/(\/[a-z0-9]*\.pl)$//g;
    } ## End unless
#    $operatingsystemoldnt = 1;
#    $slash = '\\';
    $slash = '/';
  } ## End if
  else {
    $operatingsystem = 1;
    $systempath = "$ENV{'SCRIPT_FILENAME'}";
    $systempath =~ s/(\/[a-z0-9]*\.pl)$//g;
    if ($systempath =~ /cgiwrap/) {
      $systempath = "$ENV{'PATH_TRANSLATED'}";
      $systempath =~ s/(\/[a-z0-9]*\.pl)$//g;
    } ## End if
    $slash = '/';
  } ## End else
## $systempath = "systempath to your folder"; ## Enter the correct val
+ue and un-comment this if you are having system path detection proble
+ms
  push (@INC, "$systempath");
} ## End BEGI

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";

## Directory navigator


$directorypath = "c:/";
my @directories;
my @variables;
my $directoryname = 1;
push (@directories,"$directorypath");

until ($directoryname eq "rerasfsdfsdfsdf") {
  $directoryname = shift (@directories);
  chomp($directoryname);
 opendir(CURRENTDIR, "$directoryname");
  @dirfiles = readdir (CURRENTDIR);
 closedir(CURRENTDIR);
 foreach $filename (@dirfiles) {
  chomp($filename);
  unless ($filename eq "." || $filename eq "..") {
    if (-d "$directoryname/$filename") {
      push (@directories,"$directoryname/$filename");
      print "$directoryname/$filename\n";
    } ## End if
  } ## End unless
 } ## End loop
} ## End loop
[download]

Is this a problem with the Perl interpreter? Not really, but Perl is the mechanism which allows this problem to exist

No. Using the CGI with IIS is the mechanism which allows this problem to exist. If you were to create a CGI program with equivalent resource usage in Visual Basic, C, Windows Batch files or infact PHP you would experience the same results. Please feel free to try this yourself. Note that the Microsoft documentation on tuning IIS alludes to the problem, but does not once mention Perl. No-one is denying anything here but instead trying to point out you are barking up the wrong tree.

And before you start on the fact that ASP or PHP don't appear to experience the same problem you probably should know that PHP (when run as an ISAPI extension and not as CGI ) and ASP run in-process to IIS and do not require IIS to spawn a new process. You might also care to try your example in a PerlScript ASP page to see what might happen.

/J\

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but what you appear to be saying is this: "because some newbie perl coders are putting buggy code onto live sites, and thus bringing those webservers to a halt, perl needs to be changed". That makes absolutely no sense to me(update), in particular when its a problem that only manifests itself on IIS - basically, its not a perl problem.(/update)

BTW I don't appear to have any problem whatsoever terminating these processes in taskmgr with or without the alarm() and however long I leave it and however many I have running at no point does the server become unuseable. That you are seeing something different would point to a badly configured server.

/J\