Network Programming with Perl

About Threads

Multithreading is quite different from multiprocessing. Instead of there being two or more processes, each with its own memory space, signal handlers, and global variables, multithreaded programs have a single process in which run several "threads of execution." Each thread runs independently; it can loop or perform I/O without worrying about the other threads that are running. However, all threads share global variables, filehandles, signal handlers, and other resources.

While this sharing of resources enables threads to interact in a much more intimate way than the separate processes created by fork(), it creates the possibility of resource contention. For example, if two threads try to modify a variable at the same time, the ...