RE (tilly) 4: Threads vs Forking (Java vs Perl)

[tilly]

Well it is more anti-SMP than anything else. :-)

But at a deeper level it is about why forking entire copies of the OS into a virtual cluster should scale better than trying the multi-threaded SMP approach. So yes, it does support forking.

Besides which, if you take this approach, then on monster boxes forking should scale better than threading.

An incidental note. There are problems that the 4 CPU box can outperform the 16-processor cluster at. But for most people the cluster is a better answer, and Linus is very aware of that.