Message 325645 - Python tracker
Serhiy Storchaka: "If this is an optimization, what is the downside of always using vfork()?" I don't know the vfork() function, but you can find articles like: "vfork considered dangerous" (old article of 2012) https://ewontfix.com/7/ But it's unclear to me if vfork() drawbacks also affect posix_spawn(). posix_spawn() is well defined: call vfork() and then immediately exec(). Another article: "First is that vfork pauses the parent thread while the child executes and eventually calls an exec family function, this is a huge latency problem for applications." https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/08/19/launching-helper-process-under-memory-and-latency-constraints-pthread_create-and-vfork/