At 7:26 AM +0100 7/16/03, David Cantrell wrote:If you fork() you avoid both that overhead and the overhead of compiling your code to bytecode. And while you can't nice a process that you are forking off, you could do something like system("renice $niceness -p $$") in the new process.Interesting. The fork(2) man page seems to indicate that forking a process makes a complete copy of it. Is this actually the case or is this some sort of lazy (e.g., copy on write) equivalent?
As far as the program is concerned, it's a complete copy. But yes, most modern virtual memory implementations will, I believe, do copy on write. I haven't actually tested this on OS X though :-)
-- David Cantrell
