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asynchronousparallel-processing
zmaten
zmaten

Reputation: 477

Parallel VS asynchronous programming

While I have tried to dive into both techniques it is still a bit blurry to me for which problems and situations these are used.

If I simplify this, are CPU-bound problems handled with parallel and IO-bound ones async programming?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 956

Answers (1)

Chris K
Chris K

Reputation: 11907

Perhaps a better title for this question would be 'to block or not to block?' as going parallel or asynchronous are not mutually exclusive.

I recommend using multiple threads on a problem either 1) when it is both CPU bound, and can be split up into multiple parts that do not require coordination/sharing to complete or 2) the job may stall for a long period of time on IO and we do not want to prevent other work from occurring.

Asynchronous basically means, don't block a thread waiting for something to complete. Instead rely on a callback that will notify of its completion. As such one can go asynchronous when there is only one worker thread.

Asynchronous techniques have been resurfacing recently because they scale better than blocking techniques. This is because we are limited in how many threads we can have on a single system before the overheads of managing those threads dominate.

Upvotes: 1

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