On Thu, 7 Mar 2013 14:18:12 +0100
Matus UHLAR - fantomas <uh...@fantomas.sk> wrote:
I'm not talking about the semantics but about the implementation.
Simply said, vfork() was developed to avoid process memory copying
used at fork(). on linux, fork() does NOT copy process memory.
On 07.03.13 09:48, David F. Skoll wrote:
vfork() also suspends execution of the parent until the child calls
execve or _exit. If the child happens to write into its memory, the parent
sees the changes... very different from fork().
I think Giampaolo Tomassoni got the point in his reply to the same mail I
was replying to.
Now, as for the great benefits of copy-on-write: It is actually almost
useless with Perl programs. Here's the reason: Perl uses
reference-counting to know when to free memory. So even if you access
memory "read-only" by creating a new reference to the underlying object,
that effectively becomes a write operation and Linux needs to copy the
page.
luckily, this does not happen at fork() time but at the time memory is
changed. Mamory may stay unchanged, so even after some time the memory
footprint can be smaller.
--
Matus UHLAR - fantomas, uh...@fantomas.sk ; http://www.fantomas.sk/
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