My script does the following: forks several children, each child has some data to update/insert into the db, each child sleep()'s until all the child have done their work then they all commit. I do this by having each child touch a file when they are done their work and ready to commit. Each child then waits in a loop, counts the number of touch files to see if all of them have finished. If so they all commit. The problem is that Im getting alot of 'Lock wait timeout exceeded' errors from MySQL. I have a feeling its related to the sleeping children. Can anyone offer some background into this? Or some suggestions to solve it. I had to fork and have children do the work because having 1 process do it took too long. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

thank you