[sathya]
... The zeoclient causes threads to be created but there are no "forks" or "system" calls as far as I can tell (or strace for that matter) Can you please point out where in the zeo code does forking occur ? I will try and duplicate this condition.
ZEO and ZEO never fork -- they wouldn't be portable if they did (only Unixish systems have fork()). The only forking you'll find here is in startup scripts specific to Unixish systems. Dieter is talking about forks (whether direct or indirect) in *application* code, not in the Zope/ZEO cores. If application code running in a Zope/ZEO process forks, and Zope/ZEO are running asyncore in a thread, and the fork() implementation does clone all threads (which does not happen under Windows or POSIX), then of course the fork() the application code does is going to create a clone of the asyncore thread too. That said, it would indeed be helpful if Dieter revealed enough details about what his app did, and on which kind of system, so it would be possible for others to try to duplicate his results. I have no doubt that he is seeing problems, BTW -- Dieter has an excellent track record.