forking off the process to do the job would be the best.

Do you realize that forking is very much different from threading? Fork actually copy the memory from one process to another, causing more memory use. A forked proccess can only comunicate with the parent process with IPC and shared memort. With threads the memory *is* shared, and you don't need to handle that.

The question is that there are uses for fork and for threads, and using threads when forking is better is as bad as using fork when threading is better. Do you want an example?

First: Implementing a networking application that needs to continuosly read and continuosly write from sockets. It can be done with fork, but it would be much better (from an OS view) to do with threads.

Second: JBOSS uses too much threads and too few forks. The result is that I can easily see it eating 900 Mb of RAM beause of some jobs that uses more memory, if it did fork, these procesess that eat memory would run in a forked procecss and the memory would be given back to the Operating System.

I think there is no way to say "Why do I need threads, since I have fork?"... It's the same to say "Why do I need a car, since I have a stomach?"...

daniel

In reply to Re^3: Threading vs perl by ruoso
in thread Threading vs perl by Eyck

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