site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Jan 27, 2008, at 2:46 PM, Jonas Maebe wrote: - Jordan _______________________________________________ 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... 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. It would be interesting to benchmark this in 10.5 as well, given a number of changes to the relevant code, but the original poster who noted that vfork() was deprecated was correct. At some point, I would not be at all surprised to see a "#define vfork fork" in unistd.h so that code path can be deprecated entirely. In another couple of releases, posix_spawn(2) will also hopefully be far enough in our rear view mirrors that developers can standardize on it. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com