Disadvantages of Fork System Call
- Memory Overhead: The fork system call has memory overhead even with the copy-on-write optimisation. The parent process is first copied in its entirety, including all of its memory, which increases memory use.
- Duplication of Resources: When a process forks, the child process duplicates all open file descriptors, network connections, and other resources. This duplication may waste resources and perhaps result in inefficiencies.
- Communication complexity: The fork system call generates independent processes that can need to coordinate and communicate with one another. To enable data transmission across processes, interprocess communication methods, such as pipes or shared memory, must be built, which might add complexity.
- Impact on System Performance: Forking a process duplicates memory allocation, resource management, and other system tasks. Performance of the system may be affected by this, particularly in situations where processes are often started and stopped.
Fork System Call in Operating System
In many operating systems, the fork system call is an essential operation. The fork system call allows the creation of a new process. When a process calls the fork(), it duplicates itself, resulting in two processes running at the same time. The new process that is created is called a child process. It is a copy of the parent process. The fork system call is required for process creation and enables many important features such as parallel processing, multitasking, and the creation of complex process hierarchies.
It develops an entirely new process with a distinct execution setting. The new process has its own address space, and memory, and is a perfect duplicate of the caller process.
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