You're resurrecting memories from the mists of time, but I seem to remember a common design pattern back in the day for cases like this was to have a persistent

You're resurrecting memories from the mists of time, but I seem to remember a common design pattern back in the day for cases like this was to have a persistent lightweight parent that would fork a processing child that could then request the parent perform fork-and-exec operations. But it's been a while....