Concurrent Programming on Windows

14 Performance and Scalability

CONCURRENCY IS OFTEN used in performance sensitive situations. In fact, a growingly popular reason people turn to concurrency is to better utilize parallel hardware due to the increasing mass market availability of multicore and SMP computers. But concurrency hasn’t always had a place in the PC market. Historically, concurrent programming has dominated server-side scenarios, where scalability and utilization are very important. This includes Web and more exotic high performance computing (HPC) applications. The kind of performance consciousness needed to do fine-grained client-side concurrency is similar to that which is needed for server-side scaling—much more than the traditional style of performance tuning, ...