Advanced Python Programming

Processes versus threads

One of the most common mistakes that programmers make when developing concurrent and parallel applications is to confuse the structure and functionalities of processes and threads. As we have seen from Chapter 10, Working with Threads in Python, a thread is the smallest unit of programming code, and is typically a component of a process. Furthermore, more than one thread can be implemented within the same process to access and share memory or other resources, while different processes do not interact in this way. This relationship is shown in the following diagram:

Diagram of two threads executing in one process