Camaleón wrote: > No... I guess this is quite similar to the way most of the daemons do > when running in background and launch several instances (like "amavisd- > new" does)
That is an optimization to help with the latency overhead associated with forking processes. In order to reduce the response time to react to an external event such as arrival of email or processing a web page many daemons such as those pre-fork copies ahead of time so that they will be ready and waiting. Those processes don't consume cpu time while waiting. They do consume memory and cpu scheduling queue resources. But pre-forked, ready to go, and waiting they just sit there waiting for something to do. But then when there is I/O and they have something to do then they can get going on it very quickly since they are already loaded in memory. This reduces response latency. Bob
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