Re: PostgreSQL pre-fork speedup

Yes, I realize it's a bit old but I just wanted to
make a small point that forking is slower. It's funny
you should ask because thread creation on Linux has in
fact improved over process creation much more in 2.4
kernel.

Benchmark at IBM shows Linux 2.4 thread creation is
30x faster than process creation. Process creation on
Windows 2000 is about twice longer than process
creation on Linux. This means forking on Win32 will be
2x slower! See 2002 benchmark below:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-rt7/?Open&t=grl,l=252,p=mgth

Cheers,

--- Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> sdv mailer said:
> > Forking is expensive on many systems. Linux is a
> bit
> > better but still expensive compared to threads. On
> > Windows, creating process is much more expensive
> than
> > on Linux. Check this benchmark:
> >
> >
>
http://cs.nmu.edu/~randy/Research/Papers/Scheduler/understanding.html
> >
> > Forking shouldn't be taken lightly as free thing.
> > There are pros and cons. The general trend is
> going
> > towards threads, but that's a different issue.
> >
> >
>
> This article shows a 3x speedup for thread creation
> over fork(), not the
> numbers you have quoted. Furthermore, it talks about
> Linux kernel 2.0.30.
> Do you know how old that is? The paper itself comes
> from Linux Journal,
> January 1999, according to the author's web site.
>
> Argument will get you nowhere - if you want it done
> then do it and prove
> everyone wrong.
>
> cheers
>
> andrew
>
>
>
>
>
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