c - Why are threads called lightweight processes?

Question

A thread is "lightweight" because most of the overhead has already been accomplished through the creation of its process.

I found this in one of the tutorials.

Can somebody elaborate what it exactly means?

Answer 1

The claim that threads are "lightweight" is - depending on the platform - not necessarily reliable.

An operating system thread has to support the execution of native code, e.g. written in C. So it has to provide a decent-sized stack, usually measured in megabytes. So if you started 1000 threads (perhaps in an attempt to support 1000 simultaneous connections to your server) you would have a memory requirement of 1 GB in your process before you even start to do any real work.

This is a real problem in highly scalable servers, so they don't use threads as if they were lightweight at all. They treat them as heavyweight resources. They might instead create a limited number of threads in a pool, and let them take work items from a queue.

As this means that the threads are long-lived and small in number, it might be better to use processes instead. That way you get address space isolation and there isn't really an issue with running out of resources.

In summary: be wary of "marketing" claims made on behalf of threads. Parallel processing is great (increasingly it's going to be essential), but threads are only one way of achieving it.