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Alex Xu

@alexxubyte

Popular interview question: What is the difference between Process and Thread? To better understand this question, let’s first take a look at what is a Program. A Program is an executable file containing a set of instructions and passively stored on disk. One program can have multiple processes. For example, the Chrome browser creates a different process for every single tab. A Process means a program is in execution. When a program is loaded into the memory and becomes active, the program becomes a process. The process requires some essential resources such as registers, program counter, and stack. A Thread is the smallest unit of execution within a process. The following process explains the relationship between program, process, and thread. 1. The program contains a set of instructions. 2. The program is loaded into memory. It becomes one or more running processes. 3. When a process starts, it is assigned memory and resources. A process can have one or more threads. For example, in the Microsoft Word app, a thread might be responsible for spelling checking and the other thread for inserting text into the doc. Main differences between process and thread: 🔹 Processes are usually independent, while threads exist as subsets of a process. 🔹 Each process has its own memory space. Threads that belong to the same process share the same memory. 🔹 A process is a heavyweight operation. It takes more time to create and terminate.  🔹 Context switching is more expensive between processes. 🔹 Inter-thread communication is faster for threads. Over to you: 1). Some programming languages support coroutine. What is the difference between coroutine and thread? 2). How to list running processes in Linux? -- Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get a Free System Design PDF (158 pages): https://t.co/uc5M7CdXXC

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