Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

When to use parallel processing

Concurrency means stopping one task to work on another. With a coroutine, the function stops execution and waits for more input to continue. In this sense, you can have several operations pending at the same time; the computer simply switches to the next one when it is time.

This is where multitasking in operating systems comes from: a single CPU can handle multiple jobs at the same time by switching between them. In simple terms, concurrency is when multiple threads are being processed during a given time period. In contrast, parallelism means the system runs two or more threads simultaneously; that is, multiple threads are processed at a given point in time. This can only occur when there is more than one ...