If the new task can work in isolation, then yes, fork seems ideal. If the tasks need to interact, then threads seem (to me) more useful. I've written web servi

If the new task can work in isolation, then yes, fork seems ideal. If the tasks need to interact, then threads seem (to me) more useful. I've written web services in the past with databases storing data (like most web applications do) and I've often wished that the potentially many processes could just be multiple threads in a single process instead, so I could have them just share an array of objects without the overhead of a database server.