From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-20T00:08:52+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Should *most* memory be release back to the system?

2007/10/19, khaines@enigo.com <khaines@enigo.com>:
> 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).

Did you fork for every request?  If so then it seems there might be a
more optimal solution (starting worker processes and then sending off
requests to them via DRb for example).

Cheers

robert