Multithreading and Multiplexing

Abstract

It is often the case nowadays that programs need to carry out more than one significant task at the same time (i.e., ‘concurrently’). For example, a GUI-driven program may be displaying a background animation while processing the user’s foreground interactions with the interface, or a Web browser may need to download and display the contents of a graphics file while rendering the rest of the associated Web page. The popularity of client/server applications over the past decade has exacerbated this demand enormously, with server programs sometimes having to process the needs of several hundreds of clients at the same time.