why not:
because if the i/o fails, your script will run forever, using
100% cpu, doing nothing.
Mh, yeah, I had a similar problem with my scripts. No
infinite loop, but a
blocking write to a fifo, as my fifo listener process was killed off.
I wasted lots of memory with my stale php processes. Sorry about that!
I fixed it by adding checks for the fifo listener (using pid files) and
aborting the php script if the write would be blocking.