● What is Concurrency?
Concurrency refers to the ability of a computing system to handle multiple tasks or processes simultaneously. It allows different parts of a program or system to make progress concurrently, potentially overlapping in execution, rather than executing tasks strictly one after another. Concurrency is essential for improving the efficiency and responsiveness of systems, especially in scenarios with multiple resources or multiple users.
Concurrency plays a crucial role in the computing area by enabling efficient utilization of system resources and enhancing overall performance. It allows programs or systems to handle multiple tasks concurrently, thereby improving responsiveness, minimizing idle time, and maximizing resource utilization. Concurrency is particularly important in areas such as multi-threaded programming, distributed computing, real-time systems, and web applications, where multiple tasks need to be executed simultaneously.
Consider a web server that receives multiple requests from different users simultaneously. By harnessing the power of concurrency, the web server is empowered to efficiently handle numerous requests simultaneously, facilitating the independent and parallel processing of each individual request. This ensures that all users receive timely responses and that the server can efficiently utilize its resources to handle the incoming requests
While concurrency and parallelism are related concepts, they have distinct characteristics:
Concurrency refers to the ability to execute multiple tasks or processes simultaneously, but not necessarily in true parallelism. In a concurrent system, tasks may be interleaved or executed in overlapping time intervals, but they may still share resources or be executed on a single processor.
Parallelism, on the other hand, involves the actual simultaneous execution of multiple tasks on separate processors or cores, typically achieving true parallel execution and faster processing.
In summary, concurrency focuses on managing the execution order and interaction between tasks, while parallelism focuses on executing tasks simultaneously to achieve performance gains through hardware parallelism.