Is fork() supported in win98?

[Anonymous Monk]

For a small (ultra efficent) web server spawning new sockets and transfering the connection to the new socket (child): you need fork to do that, but is there a way to do it without?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[davorg]

The latest builds of ActivePerl (the 5.6 series) now support fork on Win98

[Corion]

While we are talking about efficiency, fork() is really not the speed efficient way under Win32, as fork() is not a native OS feature. fork()ing under Win32 currently means that the whole process space is copied, at least all data has to be copied into the forked child.

Personally, I found besides the performance issues also some weird behaviour with sockets when using fork(), but that may have been due to using Windows 98, strange Perl code or the phase of the moon.

[Shendal]

I have played around with fork on WinNT. It is advertised as a beta feature, and I strongly suggest that you take them at their word. While programming my chatterbox client, I initially tried this new fork() feature, but it wouldn't work for anything but the simplest forks. I couldn't isolate the problem, but I suspect that it is related to certain modules not being "fork" compatible, or perhaps socket problems such as Corion had described above.

All in all, I'd suggest not using this for production work and look at it as a curiosity. Hopefully, features such as fork (and alarm!) will be fully (and reliably) implemented.

[Anonymous Monk]

Re: Is fork() supported in win98?

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.