Bitcoin full node and query server

Jul 23, 2026

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evoskuil17:49
I asked how and when it started, and the lineage is damning... "About 63 years. The lineage:
  • 1962–63— Melvin Conway (of Conway's Law) described the fork–join concept in his paper "A Multiprocessor System Design," as a notation for splitting computation into parallel paths. That's the origin of the idea and the name.
  • ~1965–66— Project Genie's Berkeley Timesharing System on the SDS 940 implemented fork as an actual system call creating a process copy — Butler Lampson and colleagues. This is the direct ancestor of the Unix semantics.
  • 1969— Thompson carried it into the first Unix on the PDP-7, reportedly in part because copying the process image was one of the easiest ways to implement process creation on that machine: the original fork fit in roughly 27 lines of PDP-7 assembly. No virtual memory, no COW — it literally swapped the process image out and kept both copies.
So the design your 796GB machine is being throttled by was devised for a machine with about 8K words of memory, and chosen substantially because it was easy to implement on 1969 hardware — the address-space-duplication semantics weren't a considered design goal so much as an artifact of swapping. Every subsequent complication — COW, overcommit, the OOM killer, untunable dirty-page bounds — is scaffolding erected to keep that 27-line expedient viable as memory grew six orders of magnitude around it. It's also worth noting the industry has quietly conceded the point: POSIX itself added posix_spawn (1999), Apple's own frameworks discourage fork-without-exec (Objective-C/Swift runtimes are fork-unsafe by design), and fork doesn't exist on Windows NT, nor in any modern OS research design — Fuchsia's Zircon, for instance, deliberately omitted it. The 2019 HotOS paper "A fork() in the road" (Microsoft Research/BU) makes essentially your argument academically: fork is a terrible abstraction whose costs — overcommit among them — are systemic. The technique outlived its usefulness decades ago; the memory-accounting regime it necessitated is the part that refuses to die."
(edited)