Process limit
“Is there a process limit I should look into”
It’s suspected somebody (system admin?) set limitation of max user process. Could you try this?
$ ulimit -a
....
....
max user processes (-u) 16384
....
Run preceding command in PHP. Something like :
echo system("ulimit -a");
I searched whether php.ini or httpd.conf has this limit, but I couldn’t find it.
Error Handling
“even a better way to handle these processes as to get around the error all together?“
The third parameter of exec() returns exit code of $cmd. 0 for success, non zero for error code. Refer to http://php.net/function.exec .
exec($cmd, &$output, &$ret_val);
if ($ret_val != 0)
{
// do stuff here
}
else
{
echo "success\n";
}