Igeometry Podcast

Fundamentals of Operating Systems Course https://os.husseinnasser.com When do you use threads? I would say in scenarios where the task is either 1) IO blocking task 2) CPU heavy 3) Large volume of small tasks In any of the cases above, it is favorable to offload the task to a thread. 1) IO blocking task When you read from or write to disk, depending on how you do it and the kernel interface you used, the write might be blocking. This means the process that executes the IO will not be allowed to execute any more code until the write/read completes. That is why you see most logging operations are done on a secondary thread (like libuv that Node uses) this way the thread is blocked but the main process/thread can resume its work. If you can do file reads/writes asynchronously with say io_uring then you technically don't need threading. Now notice how I said file IO because it is different than socket IO which is always done asynchronously with epoll/select etc. 2) CPU heavy The second use case