What is the best definition of a thread and what is a process? If I call a function, how do I know that a thread is calling it or a process (or am I not understanding it??!). This is in a multi-core system (quadcore).
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What is the best definition of a thread and what is a process? If I call a function, how do I know that a thread is calling it or a process (or am I not understanding it??!). This is in a multi-core system (quadcore).
One thing to add is how does a multi-core processor handle this. Think of a thread as the sequential execution of your code.
A core in a CPU can only execute one thread at a time. So if this thread is blocked because the program is waiting for an I/O operation to finish, the process is blocked (very simplified example: Word not responding). Multi-threading allows us to execute multiple code paths at the same time. ‘Same time’ is a bit of a lie, since only one thread can actually execute at a time in a core, but the CPU gives some small chunk of time to each thread, so it appears as if all these threads are executing at the same time. A good example here is the spell checker in Word.
If you have multiple cores, the only difference is that in an N-Core CPU you can have N threads executing at the same time. To simplify a lot, it doesn’t matter what process the threads belong to. To simply even further, you’d expect a N times performance increase. 😀