2.1.5 Thinking Concurrently

Question 1

dealing

What is meant by thinking concurrently?

Answer 1

• Skill which involves working out which parts of a program can be developed to take place or be processed at the same time
• An application is making progress on more than one task at the same time

Question 2

slice

What is concurrent processing?

Answer 2

• When each task is given a slice of processor time to make it look like the tasks are being completed simultaneously when in reality they are executed sequentially
• A system is said to be concurrent if it can support two or more actions in progress at the same time

Question 3

smaller

What is parallelism?

Answer 3

Application splits the tasks into smaller subtasks which can be processed in parallel

Question 4

multiple

What is parallel processing?

Answer 4

When multiple processors are used to complete more than one task simultaneously

Question 5

RANT

What are the advantages of concurrent processing?

Answer 5

• Reactive programming: User can interact with the application while other tasks are running in the background
• Availability of services: A long running task won’t delay a short running one
• Number of tasks completed in a given time is increased
• Time wasted by the processor waiting for a user interaction or another process is reduced

Question 6

TLR

What are the disadvantages of concurrent processing?

Answer 6

• Takes longer to process if there’s a large number of users or tasks involved as tasks cannot be completed at once
• Liveness: Tasks can suspend and wait on eachother indefinitely, causing a deadlock
• Resource consumption: Threads can consume resources in terms of scheduling, context-switching and synchronisation