It does share memory, using copy-on-write. However, this sharing was not reported accurately in the 2.4 kernel and is basically not reported at all in 2.6. You'll have to look at something else, like how much total physical RAM is being used after each process forks, to determine how much sharing is happening. There was a thread about this on the mod_perl mailing list.

In reply to Re: fork on linux 2.6 does not share memory by perrin
in thread fork on linux 2.6 does not share memory by tinita

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