Multi-Process Worker Pool

Overview

This project implements a multi-process worker pool in C using operating system concepts such as process creation (fork), inter-process communication (pipes), task scheduling, and result aggregation.

The program distributes text-processing tasks across multiple worker processes. Each worker analyzes assigned input lines and computes statistics including:

• Number of lines
• Number of words
• Number of characters
• Number of vowels

The parent process collects results from all workers and generates a final summary report.

Technical Concepts

• C Programming
• Process Creation (fork)
• Inter-Process Communication (IPC)
• Pipes
• Concurrent Task Processing
• File Input/Output
• Systems Programming
• Process Synchronization

My Contribution

I independently implemented:

• Worker process creation and management
• Task distribution across workers
• IPC using pipes
• Result aggregation
• Text-processing functions
• Command-line argument parsing
• Final reporting and worker utilization statistics

Example Usage

./workerpool -n 4 -f input.txt

Learning Outcomes

This project strengthened my understanding of operating systems concepts, concurrent programming, process management, and low-level software development in C.