Depends on the platform. Most OS's will create a new process, copy the VM tables for the old process to the new process with pages marked read-only. If a write access occurs on any of the child's data pages, they get turned into private pages. If the child process immediately execs, then it becomes much smaller, based on the size of the thing being exec'd. So the overhead during fork is in copying the VM tables of the 800MB process.
Jim > > On Thursday 31 January 2002 17:22, you wrote: > > OpenACS (http://openacs.org ) accesses ImageMagick using the exec command. > > > What happens when AOLserver of 800M+ forks > to do an "exec _whatever_" ? > Just curious .... > > Zoran >
