Fork on Linux should use copy-on-write vmpages now, so if you fork inside python it should be cheap. If you launch a new Python process from let's say the shell, and it's already in the buffer cache, then you should only have to pay the startup CPU cost of the interpreter, since the IO should be satisfied from buffer cache...
charleshn|9 months ago
No, that's exactly the point I'm making, copying PTEs is not cheap on a large address space, woth many VMAs.
You can run a simple python script allocating a large list and see how it affects fork time.
charleshn|9 months ago