The hash copies in each fork don't update the parent's hash, and I'm left with the hash as it was at load time being re-written. Here is some dumbed-down code to illustrate:

If I understand your statement correctly I would not expect modifications of data within a child to be "felt" back at the parent. When you fork a child it recieves a copy of the parent's data space at fork. When the child terminates any changes to that data space are lost with the child.

Now, if your parent reads the database after the children update it and doesn't see changes then you have a completely different problem set.