Anywhere that you might block on some resource (a disk access, a network connection, etc) where you can easily get other things done while you're waiting for the resource to free up would be a good place to start. If the results of the routine that is blocking do not need to be considered immediately, this is a great place to think about forking.

For a questionable example, you might have a CGI that sends an email when the form is submitted. You could potentially dispatch the mail sending process, which could take an inordinate amount of time for reasons beyond your control, via fork(). This way, the user interface responds rapidly, while the back-end processing could take as long as it needs to get the job done.

Personally, I don't find myself forking or creating threads all that often, so I'm extremely curious as to what other monks have to say. But, I hope this gives you at least one more valid example.

--jwest 
-><- -><- -><- -><- -><-
All things are Perfect
    To every last Flaw
    And bound in accord
         With Eris's Law
 - HBT; The Book of Advice, 1:7

In reply to Re: Practical, efficient uses for fork() by jwest
in thread Practical, efficient uses for fork() by vilk

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