Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Benefits of Concurrency

Concurrent programming can be used to improve performance, to create scalable and fault-tolerant systems, and to write clear and understandable programs for controlling real-world applications. The following are some of the reasons why this is true:

Performance

Imagine you have two tasks: A, which takes ten seconds to perform, and B, which takes fifteen seconds. On a single CPU doing both, A and B will take twenty-five seconds. On a computer with two CPUs that operate independently, doing A and B will take only fifteen seconds. To achieve this performance improvement, we have to write a concurrent program.

Until recently, parallel computers were rare and expensive, but today multicore computers are commonplace. A top-end ...