Network Programming with Perl

Preforking

It's easiest to understand how a preforked server works by contrasting it with an accept-and-fork server. As you recall from Chapter 6, accept-and-fork servers spend most of their time blocking in accept(), waiting for a new incoming connection. When the connection comes in, the parent wakes up just long enough to call fork() and pass the connected socket to its child. After forking, the child process goes on to handle the connection, while the parent process goes back to waiting for accept().

The core of an accept-and-fork server are these lines of code:

 while ( my $c = $socket->accept ) { my $child = fork; die unless defined $child; if ($child == 0) { # in child process handle_connection($c); exit 0; } close $c; # in parent process ...