Re: PostgreSQL pre-fork speedup

On Wed, 5 May 2004, sdv mailer wrote:

> Forking is quite fast on Linux but creating a new
> process is still 10x more expensive than creating a
> thread and is even worse on Win32 platform. CPU load
> goes up because the OS needs to allocate/deallocate
> memory making it difficult to get a steady state
> resource consumption.

Just a nit to pick here.  In Linux, the difference between forking and 
spawning a new thread is almost nothing.  Definitely less than a factor of 
2, and most assuredly less than the quoted factor of 10 here.

The fact that windows has a heavy process / lightweight thread design 
means little to me, since I'll likely never deploy a production postgresql 
server on it that needs to handle any serious load.