From: khaines@...
Date: 2007-10-19T23:44:41+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Should *most* memory be release back to the system?

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> fork() (or clone() in Linux) is cheap ... it's actually *instantiating* the 
> thread or process that costs! Depending how smart your kernel is, you could

This is just a side note, but the sentence above reminded me of it.

Some time ago I wrote a Mongrel variation that used fork() on incoming 
requests instead of spawning a thread.  Throughput on it was lousy, 
comparatively.  Somewhere around an order of magnitude worse than using 
Ruby threads.

It would work for modest volume sites, but there was a large response time 
tax imposed by forking versus using the Ruby threads.  This was tested on 
a Linux box, though it was an older (2.4.x kernel).


Kirk Haines