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Asked: 2026-05-25T11:15:32+00:00

I noticed that the PID of the processes my webapp is spawning keeps getting

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I noticed that the PID of the processes my webapp is spawning keeps getting larger over time.

For each process, the PID is stored in a file to reference from the web app. I originally had a file buffer of 8 bytes to read the PID from.. While 8 bytes is probably enough, I’m noticing i may need to increase this buffer size if these numbers go up over a long period of time..

Do PID values ever get lower? Or only after a reboot and it starts over again?

What should my buffer size be if I’m reading a single PID value from a file? Should I just set a very large buffer?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    On most operating systems, PID’s wrap around to 0 after 65535. It is not a safe assumption to assume that pid’s will only grow larger.

    In principle, a pid could be any non-negative pid_t, which on GNU systems is an int, so

    231-1 =
    2147483647

    would be the largest such pid even theoretically possible.

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