I have this idea for a CMS (this is a technical exercise only). Traditional CMS's have modules / plugins which deliver a separated piece of functionality extending the base CMS's capabilities.

This got me thinking, what if I spawn a process per plugin in my node based prototype. I could use sigstop and sigcont to pause and resume processes on demand. Infact I have wrote a small API for this and it works! Fantastic, but what if in (my wildest dreams) my CMS turned into the next WordPress or Drupal? A user might add around 100 plugins I suppose. Could the average host handle all this?

What are the limits?

I could assume that some plugins are dependent on another main plugin and so these could run in the same process, that would reduce the amount of processes.

What do you think?

If I'm looking for benchmarks for node's nodeyness what would I Google?