Benefits of Multithreading*

This concurrent activity speeds applications up - one of the main benefits of multithreading.

MT allows both the full exploitation of parallel hardware and the effective use of multiple processor subsystems. While MT is essential for taking advantage of the performance of symmetric multiprocessors, it also provides performance benefits on uniprocessor systems by improving the overlap of operations such as computation and I/O.

Some of the most important benefits of MT are:

• Improved throughput. Many concurrent compute operations and I/O requests within a single process.

• Simultaneous and fully symmetric use of multiple processors for computation and I/O

• Superior application responsiveness. If a request can be launched on its own thread, applications do not freeze or show the "hourglass". An entire application will not block, or otherwise wait, pending the completion of another request.

• Improved server responsiveness. Large or complex requests or slow clients don't block other requests for service. The overall throughput of the server is much greater.

• Minimized system resource usage. Threads impose minimal impact on system resources. Threads require less overhead to create, maintain, and manage than a traditional process.

• Program structure simplification. Threads can be used to simplify the structure of complex applications, such as server-class and multimedia applications. Simple routines can be written for each activity, making complex programs easier to design and code, and more adaptive to a wide variation in user demands.

• Better communication. Thread synchronization functions can be used to provide enhanced process-to-process communication. In addition, sharing large amounts of data through separate threads of execution within the same address space provides extremely high-bandwidth, low-latency communication between separate tasks within an application.