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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!gatech2!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!iglou!heathers.stdio.com!usenet From: risner@stdio.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy Subject: Re: Win32 CreateThread() vs Unix fork() Date: 10 Dec 1995 06:20:18 GMT Organization: Image Tech Computing Lines: 32 Message-ID: <4adu72$nkf@heathers.stdio.com> References: <4ab85f$idq@news.voicenet.com> Reply-To: risner@stdio.com NNTP-Posting-Host: os2 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10918 comp.unix.advocacy:12436 In <4ab85f$idq@news.voicenet.com>, 900RR (900RR) writes: > >Win32's CreateThread() is an extremely fast and efficient way of > >By contrast, Unix uses fork() to start an entire new process to >In any case, does anyone know how much more efficient a server >application could run under an NT system than the same app, same >hardware on something like FreeBSD or Linux? >Do veteran Unix programmers avoid fork() like the plague? No. FreeBSD (and any other current UN*X) implements fork() as creating a new process (slightly more overhead than creating a new thread) and performs copy-on-write so that it maps in the old process text segment and data segment. Look at http://corp.novell.com/press/pr95251.htm It has a article from ZIFF which compares NT and various commercial UN*X systems. UnixWare was VERY NEARLY twice as fast in terms of transactions per second as compared to NT. SCO was around 50% faster than NT. I would be interested in seeing a test compare of servers for Linux, FreeBSD, UnixWare, SCO, NT, OS/2 because this article did not contain any free UN*X tested. I think you will find that the UN*X camp will fair better than NT in most multi-process/multi-thread arena simply from maturity. There are a lot of issues to deal with for NT. Risner The only UN*X which NEEDS special documentation is LINUX! Long live V7; Skip Solaris 2.x; FreeBSD IS the PC UN*X