进程和线程的区别

线程和进程的区别和优劣：

1、进程是资源分配的最小单位，线程是程序执行的最小单位。

2、进程有自己的独立地址空间，每启动一个进程，系统就会为它分配地址空间，建立数据表来维护代码段、堆栈段和数据段，这种操作非常昂贵。而线程是共享进程中的地址空间，因此CPU切换一个线程的花费远比进程要小很多，同时创建一个线程的开销也比进程要小很多。

3、线程之间的通信更方便，同一进程下的线程共享全局变量、静态变量等数据，而进程之间的通信需要以通信的方式（IPC)进行。不过如何处理好同步与互斥是编写多线程程序的难点。

4、但是多进程程序更健壮，多线程程序只要有一个线程死掉，整个进程也死掉了，而一个进程死掉并不会对另外一个进程造成影响，因为进程有自己独立的地址空间

歪果仁的原话------》》《Unix网络编程》：

• fork is expensive. Memory is copied from the parent to the child, all descriptors are duplicated in the child, and so on. Current implementations use a technique called copy-on-write, which avoids a copy of the parent’s data space to the child until the child needs its own copy. But, regardless of this optimization, fork is expensive.

• IPC is required to pass information between the parent and child after the fork. Passing information from the parent to the child before the fork is easy, since the child starts with a copy of the parent’s data space and with a copy of all the parent’s descriptors. But, returning information from the child to the parent takes more work.

• Threads help with both problems. Threads are sometimes called lightweight processes since a thread is “lighter weight” than a process. That is, thread creation can be 10–100 times faster than process creation.

• All threads within a process share the same global memory. This makes the sharing of information easy between the threads, but along with this simplicity comes the problem