Introduction to Programming

Sequential or parallel processing?

As we indicated in the previous section, parallel processing may or may not produce better performance. One has to test every use case before deciding to use it. Parallelism can yield better performance, but the code has to be designed and possibly optimized to do it. And each assumption has to be tested in the environment as close to the production as possible.

However, there are a few considerations one can take into account while deciding between sequential and parallel processing:

• Small streams typically are processed faster sequentially (well, what is "small" for your environment should be determined through testing and measuring the performance)
• If stateful operations cannot be replaced with stateless ...