On 2005-10-13, Paul Rubin <> wrote: > Jorgen Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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?? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list