> A zygote process is one that listens for spawn requests from a main process and forks itself in response. Generally they are used because forking a process after some expensive setup has been performed can save time and share extra memory pages.

I think reading the first sentance and stopping covers my zygote, but adding the second sentance covers yours. So I think we're both right!

I think both paths are useful. If your children need time to startup and become ready, spawn one that does start up work, and then it (pre)forks at the ready state to have processes ready to handle requests (your zygote). This does require a traditional fork() to avoid duplication of work.

But if forking is expensive at runtime because you have a million FDs open and a whole lot of memory allocations, spawn spawners before you start doing work (my zygote). This could be unnecessary with a inexpensive way to spawn a new process from an process that has lots of resources in use.

Of course, you can also use my zygotes to spawn your zygotes. Zygoteception.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/l...