You're using threads! But they're heavy-weight threads (vs. the light-weight threads previously discussed). It might be heavy-handed, but it's not brutal. And it gets the job done!

As wikipedia says, "a thread is a lightweight process." The flip side is that a process is a heavyweight thread. In your case, since you spawn (fork) the thread, it runs independently of the parent thread, and then exits, you probably wouldn't see much difference in performance, especially if you fork before the parent process has gotten fat.