dce/rpc "client" api
Peter Samuelson
peter at cadcamlab.org
Thu Aug 24 04:21:33 GMT 2000
[me]
> > The old Unix culture of "fork() is massively expensive and use
> > should be minimized at all costs" is not always true on modern
> > Unices; Linux in particular has a fairly cheap fork().
[Luke Leighton]
> yep, copy-on-write, i am relying on it :)
Well, that's the big one, but not the only factor. I don't have any
hard numbers but I heard at one point that on Solaris it is something
like 10x cheaper to create a new thread than fork a new process -- and
that's *with* copy-on-write, so I have no idea why. (Paging Dave ...
Paging Dave C-B....) But I guess some other brands of Unix are like
this too. This is one big reason to use threads on Unix,
traditionally: they are perceived as more efficient. Solaris calls
threads "light-weight processes" for a reason.
In Linux, on the other hand, instead of 10x it's more like 1.5x or so.
(Not that threads are *less* efficient -- mostly that fork() is *more*
efficient.) Thus the cost argument for threads doesn't hold up so
much. (But there can still be other reasons!)
Peter
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