Re: Opportunistic GC

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm not sure. I do know some systems prefer using spawn() to fork() +
> exec(), and I always suspected the main reason for that is because
> they do not have an efficient fork().

IIRC the reason is that `fork` can be unnecessarily costly if your
forked application is large and it just wants to spawn a small /bin/sh
process: while `fork` doesn't need to copy the application's pages, it
still has to copy its pagetable(!) and it may have to pre-allocate or
pre-reserve the pages that it may copy-on-write later.


        Stefan