seamusabshere/unix_utils — Issue #1: perhaps use spawn instead of fork
Author: jjb
Created: 2012-03-02 23:10:00+00:00
State: open

Open3 uses fork(2) to create the process running the system command, which will replicate the entire environment (all the memory) while the command is running. So, a 100 meg ruby program that invokes `echo foo` will be using 200 megs until that command is finished.

An alternative is to use posix_spawn(2):

https://github.com/rtomayko/posix-spawn