Feb. 10, 2012
3:43 p.m.
On 10 February 2012 14:52, Massimo Di Pierro <massimo.dipierro@gmail.com> wrote:
Forking is a solution only for simple toy cases and in trivially parallel cases. People use processes to parallelize web serves and task queues where the tasks do not need to talk to each other (except with the parent/master process). If you have 100 cores even with a small 50MB program, in order to parallelize it you go from 50MB to 5GB. Memory and memory access become a major bottle neck.
I don't know much about forking, but I'm pretty sure that forking a process doesn't mean you double the amount of physical memory used. With copy-on-write, a lot of physical memory can be shared. -- Arnaud