Question

I have a list of class pointers. I have a function that calls a method from these pointers. Each pointer in the list is a derived class from a main class. What i am currently doing is iterate through the list and call the method of 1st pointer in the list, wait for it to finish, then go to the 2nd class object pointer and call the method and so on.

Now i have like 20 derived classes and it is taking forever to complete through the list. So i wanted to use fork to execute maybe 4-5 class methods at once so that the whole process is that much fast..

list<Myclass *> check;

myfunc(list<Myclass *> check)
{
     for(list<Myclass*>::iterator a= check.begin();a!=check.end();a++)
          (*a)->run();
}

this is kinda a skeleton of what i have…
What i want is like each time it will fork and create a child process to execute the command and moveon to the next one…

Answer 1

Yes, you can use fork() to do some work in a child thread. However, once the child process is done doing it’s work, it returns and you are not sharing data between them. I am not clear on your implementation but if the intent is to spawn off some processes to do some extra work, then that seems OK, but you probably want a thread, not fork.