Doh! Stupid Programming Mistakes <humor>

[Corey Edwards]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 12:39 -0600, Alex Esplin wrote:
> This is going to show my inexperience in a big way, but I might as
> well take the chance to learn some more today.
> 
> Now that I know what fork() does, what kind of situations would you
> want to use it in?  I can see this as being really useful, but I don't
> quite have my head wrapped around it yet.

One very common use is when writing a network server. The default (and
easiest) way to use sockets is with blocking calls. That means that you
make a call to read data from the network and the OS blocks further
execution until more data is ready. That's fine if you only want one
client, but hardly a solution. So instead you fork off a child for each
connection.

        socket();
        while (accept()){
          if (!fork()){
            /* child handles this connection */
            return 0;
          }
          else{
            /* parent just carries on and waits for the next one */
          }
        }
        
At a certain point this becomes unwieldy, so they creating non-blocking
sockets where you can have a single process check to see if data is
available. If it's not, the call returns immediately saying so and you
carry on. It takes a different coding paradigm, but can scale much
further.

Corey

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