Comment by avar
1 day ago
every HTTP session was commonly a forked
copy of the entire server in the CERN
and Apache lineage!
And there's nothing wrong with that for application workers. On *nix systems fork() is very fast, you can fork "the entire server" and the kernel will only COW your memory. As nginx etc. showed you can get better raw file serving performance with other models, but it's still a legitimate technique for application logic where business logic will drown out any process overhead.
Forking for anything other than calling exec is still a horrible idea (with special exceptions like shells). Forking is a very unsafe operation (you can easily share locks and files with the child process unless both your code and every library you use is very careful - for example, it's easy to get into malloc deadlocks with forked processes), and its performance depends a lot on how you actually use it.
So long as you have something like nginx in front of your server. Otherwise your whole site can be taken down by a slowloris attack over a 33.6k modem.