The usual implementation is to have a small controller section of code that forks off the workload onto its child processes. Try to keep you memory footprint of the controller as small as possible. Both the controller section and the worker section are often included in the same binary or script, so that if you have one, you have everything you need to run.
If you are writing a true daemon, have it die and restart periodically. This will get rid of unused memory, open files and sockets, and zombie children that were never harvested. This is usually done by having an entry in the appropriate /etc/rc file.
