What is Threading ?
- A thread is a flow of execution through the process code, with its own program counter that keeps way of which instruction to execute next, system registers which hold its existing working variables, and a stack which contains the execution history. A thread is also called as lightweight process.
- A thread shares with its peer threads few information like code segment, data segment and open files.
- To improve application performance through parallelism.
- Threads represent a software approach to improving performance of operating system by reducing the overhead thread is equivalent to a classical process.
- Each thread has exactly one process and no thread can exist outside a process. Each thread signifies a separate flow of control.
- Implementing network servers and web server.
- They are also offer a suitable foundation for parallel execution of applications on shared memory multiprocessors.
- The working process of a single-threaded and a multithreaded are shows in the following figure.
What is Threading
Advantages of Thread
- The context switching time minimize in thread concepts.
- Use of threads offers concurrency within a process.
- Efficient communication.
- It is more economical to create and context switch threads.
- Threads allow utilization to a greater scale and efficiency of multiprocessor architectures.
Types of Thread
- There are two types of thread,
- User Level Threads.
- Kernel Level Threads.
User Level Threads
- In this case, the thread management kernel is not aware of the existence of threads.
- The thread library contains code for creating and destroying threads, for transient message and data between threads, for scheduling thread execution and for saving and reestablishing thread settings.
- From the single thread start the application.
User Level Thread
Kernel Level Threads
- Kernel is done thread management.
- In the application area there is no thread management code.
- The operating system directly supported Kernel threads.
- Multithreaded can be programmed in an any application.
- An application is supported within a single process.