Chapter 10 ▪ Concurrency
You are probably familiar with multitasking—your operating system's ability to have more than one program working at what seems like the same time. For example, you can print while editing or downloading your email. Nowadays, you are likely to have a computer with more than one CPU, but the number of concurrently executing processes is not limited by the number of CPUs. The operating system assigns CPU time slices to each process, giving the impression of parallel activity.
Multithreaded programs extend the idea of multitasking by taking it one level lower: Individual programs will appear to do multiple tasks at the same time. Each task is executed in a thread, which is short for thread of control. Programs that ...
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