In software development, optimizing efficiency and resource utilization, particularly in cloud computing environments, is paramount. One common requirement is the simultaneous or overlapping processing of tasks within computer systems. To achieve this, various strategies such as multiprocessing and multithreading are employed to distribute workloads effectively. These approaches aim to minimize costs associated with resource allocation while maximizing the utilization of available computing resources, thereby enhancing overall system performance and responsiveness.
A process is a distinct unit of computation. In certain scenarios, especially in resource-intensive pipelines, dividing tasks into multiple processes can effectively leverage the available processing power and enhance efficiency. Multiprocessing, a programming technique, enables the concurrent execution of multiple tasks within a computer system equipped with multiple CPU cores or utilizing multiple CPUs.
The benefits of multiprocessing:
- Improved Performance: Distribution of tasks among processes allows for more resource usage per process if needed.
- Resource Utilization: You can use available CPU resources more efficiently, reducing processing time and improving system responsiveness.
- Scalability: Allows applications to scale with hardware, leveraging additional CPU cores as available.
- Load Balancing: Allows to evenly distribute tasks among available processes, ensuring that each process receives a fair share of the workload.
- Security: Due to the separation of address space and resources among processes, the program within one process cannot access the data used in another process except for the data passed to that program.
The video below shows how efficiently we’ve integrated multiprocessing, 4GL programs, and the asynchronous messaging system, ZeroMQ: