> The fundamental basis of any Unix application is the thread or process. (From the Linux OS perspective, threads and processes are mostly identical; the major difference is the degree to which they share memory.)
It's better to be specific in performance discussions, rather than use 'thread' and 'process' interchangeably.
As well as the article mentioned about memory sharing, threads (which are called Lightweight Processes, or LWPs, in Linux 'ps') are granular.
ps -eLf
NWLP in the command above is 'number of lightweight processes', ie number of threads.
Processes are not granular: they're one or many threads. IIRC it can be beneficial to assign threads of the same process to the same physical core or same die for cache affinity. There's all kind of performance stuff where 'threads' and 'processes' do not mean the same thing. Being specific is rad.
In Linux, they are both just entries in the process table. They are created by the `clone` syscall, and the "normal" way of creating them share different amounts of resources by _default_.
You're right to say that treating them differently can be beneficial in some situations, but it really depends.
> The fundamental basis of any Unix application is the thread or process. (From the Linux OS perspective, threads and processes are mostly identical; the major difference is the degree to which they share memory.)
It's better to be specific in performance discussions, rather than use 'thread' and 'process' interchangeably.
As well as the article mentioned about memory sharing, threads (which are called Lightweight Processes, or LWPs, in Linux 'ps') are granular.
NWLP in the command above is 'number of lightweight processes', ie number of threads.Processes are not granular: they're one or many threads. IIRC it can be beneficial to assign threads of the same process to the same physical core or same die for cache affinity. There's all kind of performance stuff where 'threads' and 'processes' do not mean the same thing. Being specific is rad.