Yes, of course, I was talking about overhead from the aspect of this particular app (the DBUS and other notification mechanism voodoo-s bring a twist or two in the story). Performance-wise, since 2.6 kernels, the difference is not as prominent as previously, but still, AFAIK the penalty for creating a new process is larger than it is to create a new thread. Now, if one is to do an 'exec', it doesn't really matter if it's a process or thread, it's expensive either way The gain is in small, fast, native, reentrant modules that can be checked often without a serious penalty and are easy to communicate with (no process level IPC), and threads are actually very good for that.