I'm someone who likes to use fork() and then actually use both processes as they are, with shared copy-on-write memory. I'm happy to use it on things consuming much more than 100MB of memory. In fact that's where I like it the most. I'm probably a terrible person.

But what would be better? This way I can massage my data in one process, and then fork as many other processes that use this data as I like without having to serialise it to disk and and then load it again. If the data is not modified after fork it consumes much less memory (only the page tables). Usually a little is modified, consuming only a little memory extra. If all of it is modified it doesn't consume more memory than I would have otherwise (hopefully, not sure if the Linux implementation still keeps the pre-fork copy around).

(And no, not threads. They would share modifications, which I don't want. Also since I do this in python they would have terrible performance.)