I am not sure whether this question belong to Stack Overflow or here, but here we go. I am designing a online 'C' compiler, which will compile and invoke the program if compilation succeeded. So here is code which I am using for that: $str=shell_exec("gcc path/to/file.c -o path/to/file.exe 2>&1"); if(file_exists("path/to/file.exe")){ $res=shell_exec("path/to/file.exe <inputfile 2>&1"); echo $res; } This Seems to work fine with simple program files. But When file.c That is the source code entered contains Infinite loop then This script crashes the server and utilizes a lot of memory and time. So here is my question: Is There any way to detect for how much time does the process file.exe is Running? How Much Space is Utilized by that process that is file.exe? Is There any way to kill the process file.exe if space and time utilization increases beyond certain limit? That Mean if we allocate time of 2.5sec and space of 40Mb at max for that process file.exe and if any one of those 2 constraints is violated then we should display appropriate error message to client Is it possible? I am Using WAMP (Windows 7).