don't get me wrong. i agree that some (maybe most) have a lot of bloat etc. in the end it's up to you to decide if/when/how to use a fork framework. i guess a lot of typical problems involve pre-forking daemon process(es) with a central queue mechanism and such. and hence these more complicated frameworks proliferate. it certainly would be nice to have a very minimal forking wrapper, with a nice fork function that takes care of the tiny details (handling process initiation and termination, and which signals to use etc), and nothing else.