Has any mainstream web server ever been pure demand-forked? Apache has been connection pooled since the '90s; the second edition of Unix Network Programming used it as a case study.
Exactly. Hence the "pre" in prefork. A "forking" web server (one fork per request) would be incredibly inefficient, whereas prefork is only... slightly inefficient. :-)
Ho ho ho. Back in the day, people used to run httpd off of inetd. I was real smug back then when I replaced that at our site with NCSA httpd, which did indeed fork on demand. Think this was '93 or thenabouts.
NCSA HTTP was released at the end of '93. Apache was the first mainstream server to prefork a connection pool; it's not demand-forked. There wasn't much advantage to running NCSA standalone vs. out of inetd.
I believe Apache was '95; it came out when I was working at an ISP, and I graduated from high school in '94.
