Re: ten thousand small processes

From: D. J. Bernstein (djb_at_cr.yp.to)
Date: 06/26/03

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    Date: 26 Jun 2003 02:27:22 -0000
To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org

    I want separate processes for the memory protection. Each process is
    chrooted under its own uid, so it can't write to disk except through
    supplied file descriptors, and it can't hit other processes. (If I had a
    portable way to cut off other communication channels, such as creating
    new sockets, I'd do that too.)

    I'm willing to sacrifice one page per process for the sake of memory
    protection; I realize that it's hard to do better than that. But I'm not
    willing to casually piss away large fractions of a gigabyte of RAM. Not
    this decade, anyway.

    The lack of memory protection is exactly why I can't use threads. It's
    also why I'm not surprised to hear that processes are _slightly_ less
    efficient than threads. But something is seriously wrong if processes
    are _much_ less efficient than threads.

    ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
    Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
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