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by tedunangst 5449 days ago
That's ridiculous. The overhead of fork is about a bajillion times higher than malloc.
2 comments

With a COW fork() I bet it's smaller. I smell a test coming on, but alas it's late here and I'm going to bed.

I'm also guessing that 4k was chosen because a malloc() of 1 page is faster than a malloc() of >1 page. Of course that's with the assumption that the systems use a 4k page size.

Are you sure? I'd bet it's greater, I'd not bet that it's an order of magnitude better, fork() has been optimized a lot more than brk().