Re: fork ???

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

> Sri Ramkrishna <sri@aracnet.com> writes: 
> > You probably don't want to do a full fork as it takes a lot of system
> > resources most of which you don't need.  Use a vfork and then have teh
> > child execute a execve system call.  The parent will suspend until you
> > issue the execve.
> > 
> > Caveats are that vfork doesn't make your code very portable from what I
> > glean from the linux kernel mailing list.
> >
> 
> Just use fork(), it's cheap on Linux, certainly cheap enough for most
> uses.

Well yeah. :-)  Typical PC with 64M of Ram and PentiumII processor, fork
is gonna be pretty cheap.  Not great though if you're using older machines
though where memory foot print is a lot less.  Still you need to decide
what the application is using a fork for.  If you plan on doing a lot of
forks then vfork is a lot more efficient overall. (in which case, threads
would be a better decision, but I digress)  It depends on the
application.

	sri