Depending on the type of server you are writing, you may not want the expense of forking for each request. There is certainly a movement in OS design to make forking cheap, but you still shouldn't assume it is without cost. If you typically have short sessions that require high performance and low latency, you probably want to prefork children.

I'm not sure what resources you are worried about the children consuming. COW implementations of forking mean that the children will use only minimal additional memory unless they have to. If the children are simply blocking on a select call, they won't be using any significant amount of CPU either.

In reply to Re^3: Handling multiple clients by kscaldef
in thread Handling multiple clients by jalewis2

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