I read the paper, and they make a lot of good points about fork's warts.
But I really wanted some explanation of why Windows process startup seems to be so heavyweight. Why does anything that spawns lots of little independent processes take so bloody long on Windows?
I'm not saying "lots of processes on Windows is slow, lots of processes on Linux is fast, Windows uses CreateProcess, Linux uses fork, CreateProcess is an alternative to fork/exec, therefore fork/exec is better than any alternative." I can imagine all kinds of reasons for the observed behavior, few of which would prove that fork is a good model. But I still want to know what's going on.
But I really wanted some explanation of why Windows process startup seems to be so heavyweight. Why does anything that spawns lots of little independent processes take so bloody long on Windows?
I'm not saying "lots of processes on Windows is slow, lots of processes on Linux is fast, Windows uses CreateProcess, Linux uses fork, CreateProcess is an alternative to fork/exec, therefore fork/exec is better than any alternative." I can imagine all kinds of reasons for the observed behavior, few of which would prove that fork is a good model. But I still want to know what's going on.