Let My Terminal Go

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-10-13, Paul Rubin <> wrote:
> Jorgen Grahn <jgrahn-nntq at algonet.se> writes:
>> It depends on what you mean by expensive -- web servers can fork for each
>> HTTP request they get, in real-world scenarios, and get away with it.
>
> This is OS dependent.  Forking on Windows is much more
> expensive than forking on Linux.

Under VMS, fork/exec was so expensive that the Bourne shell
implimentation in DECShell executed "simple" commands in the
shell's process rather than do a fork/exec. Shell scripts that
used pipes or similar constructs requiring fork/exec ran _very_
slowly under DECShell.

Since the NT kernel is descended from VMS, I'm not surprised
that a fork is expensive.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Why are these
                                  at               athletic shoe salesmen
                               visi.com            following me??