Avoid infinite loops during startup

[Roberta Marton]

Several times in the last month, changes were made by several people that caused a compilation request during a critical operation which had a domino affect and ended up in an infinite loop.

Examples

During the startup protocol of the compiler process the parent sent the session user ID to the compiler process. The compiler process received the user ID and tried to do a metadata read through a CLI request to get the associated username. The metadata lookup code needs to start another arkcmp process to compiler the request. The second compiler would then start up a third compiler process to compile the metadata request. Eventually, someone would fail.

In another situation, instead of starting up compiler processes, the code was starting up new embedded compiler contexts. In this case, again during start up processing, a CLI request was issued to get metadata information. This CLI request started another compiler context to compile the request, etc.

There should be a way to detect that there is some kind of infinite loop going on and stop it before it gets out of control.

Creating the LP bug to track this change.