site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com In message <9F31611D-701E-4351-B63D-916E520C584A@elis.ugent.be>, Jonas Maebe wr ites:

That's more or less true for Linux, but not for Mac OS X at least up till 10.4.x (I haven't benchmarked on 10.5 yet). Compiling our compiler with itself, which involves about 173 (v)fork+execs from a single compiler run to assemble&link all the files, is 20% to 25% slower with fork instead of vfork on a G4, and 35% to 40% on a G5 (32 bit processes in both cases) on 10.4.x. And for clarity: this is relative to the entire time needed for compiling+assembling+linking everything (on the G5: 24 vs 15 seconds), not some academic mbench- like speed difference between the fork and vforks.

Yes. It does make a difference, but even so, the API is deprecated, so even if this hurts performance a bit, it's still probably best to avoid it whenever possible.

The modern alternative is obviously posix_spawn, but we cannot use that since we still support 10.3.x (it even probably even still works on 10.1 and 10.2 as well, but I don't test those anymore).

True. That said, the code in question is a bug according to the documented semantics of vfork on OS X. -s _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com