fork affecting ndbm requests?

[jim frost]

I have an application which opens an ndbm database read-only and forks
several children to do a lot of queries on that database.  I get
periodic dbm_fetch() failures if I do this when I am certain the
records exist.  This does not happen if the application does all of
the fetches unparallelized, but there are performance losses.

Is there some reason I should not fork after opening the database?

jim frost
software tool & die
madd at std.com