Re: Forking vs. Threading

[Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com>]

On 19-Mar-04, at 9:08 AM, Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
> Bryan Encina wrote:
> > MySQL and Firebird use threads and Postgres forks.  Forking is ok,
> > unless you have many database connections.  The more connections the
> > more processes.  I noticed while profiling an application that every
> > connection alone was taking over 1MB of memory.  This based on the
> > process per connection gripe I have.
>
> Umm.. Notcied how much of that 1MB is shared?

Also, I'd expect that the amount of memory that a busy installation 
should be devoting to caching I/O (whether done by the DBMS or the 
kernel) will dwarf the amount of memory each backend has allocated 
privately.

Assuming the kernel implements COW (which is reasonable, of course), I 
don't think the overall difference in memory footprint should be very 
significant -- or rather, if it is, it results from something other 
than the choice between threads and fork().

-Neil