Four forks per second is basically nothing. This article is blowing it all out of proportion. You can't sustain forking per web request on a really large site b

Four forks per second is basically nothing. This article is blowing it all out of proportion. You can't sustain forking per web request on a really large site but at this scale it's not going to matter. The author is being stupid: the size of the process that you're forking doesn't really matter (it might start to matter if you didn't call exec() or exit() right after you forked, but that's not the case: you're just execing another program, which replaces the current process in memory). VERY little is copied; fork is defined to have copy-on-write semantics for the process's address space.