Copyright © 2001
Qusay H. Mahmoud
5
Heavyweight v. Lightweight Processes
lEach
thread of control within a heavyweight process is known as a lightweight
process
lBECAUSE it shares the same memory
lMultiple
threads of a heavyweight process can access shared data in the process’s
memory
lAccess
must be synchronized
l“heavy”
and “light” refers to the context-switching overhead (CPU and memory allocation vs.
CPU allocation)