Well, threads come with their own myriad problems. Aside from isolation, with separate process one can start/stop/kill from outside in a more sysadmin-friendly

Well, threads come with their own myriad problems. Aside from isolation, with separate process one can start/stop/kill from outside in a more sysadmin-friendly way, but also upgrade gradually. I often use these kinds of mechanisms for control-planes or one writer / thousands of readers schemes (to share huge parameters or look up tables...). It's somehow far more efficient and easier to design than pub/sub or database requests and wasting loads of memory on N copies of the same data. Start the process, map the structures and go.