the really surprising thing about that was that when your memory map only has five 4k pages in it, linux gets really fast at forking
comet was a pretty compelling reason to write your own web server 20 years ago
The chat code [I really should upload the code as the company has been dead for at least 10-15 years] worked by browsers holding an infinitely loading frame, so each client held open a connection for several hours. IIRC there was some Javascript that reloaded the connection after a few hours.
To handle 1000s of HTTP connections we had to implement our own fairly lightweight threads. It also had a cool inversion of control where you could write straight through code and it was turned into event-driven callbacks automatically. The webserver couldn't make use of multiple cores, which was lucky because the server had only 1 CPU!
Also used a pool allocator, which is very well suited to server applications.
nowadays people use websockets for comet
yeah, protothreads type stuff and pool allocators are great fits for that kind of work