Threads vs Processes in Linux

Question

Linux uses a 1-1 threading model, with (to the kernel) no distinction between processes and threads -- everything is simply a runnable task. *

On Linux, the system call clone clones a task, with a configurable level of sharing, among which are:

• CLONE_FILES: share the same file descriptor table (instead of creating a copy)
• CLONE_PARENT: don't set up a parent-child relationship between the new task and the old (otherwise, child's getppid() = parent's getpid())
• CLONE_VM: share the same memory space (instead of creating a COW copy)

fork() calls clone(least sharing) and pthread_create() calls clone(most sharing). **

forking costs a tiny bit more than pthread_createing because of copying tables and creating COW mappings for memory, but the Linux kernel developers have tried (and succeeded) at minimizing those costs.

Switching between tasks, if they share the same memory space and various tables, will be a tiny bit cheaper than if they aren't shared, because the data may already be loaded in cache. However, switching tasks is still very fast even if nothing is shared -- this is something else that Linux kernel developers try to ensure (and succeed at ensuring).

In fact, if you are on a multi-processor system, not sharing may actually be beneficial to performance: if each task is running on a different processor, synchronizing shared memory is expensive.

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* Simplified. CLONE_THREAD causes signals delivery to be shared (which needs CLONE_SIGHAND, which shares the signal handler table).

** Simplified. There exist both SYS_fork and SYS_clone syscalls, but in the kernel, the sys_fork and sys_clone are both very thin wrappers around the same do_fork function, which itself is a thin wrapper around copy_process. Yes, the terms process, thread, and task are used rather interchangeably in the Linux kernel...

Linux (and indeed Unix) gives you a third option.

Option 1 - processes

Create a standalone executable which handles some part (or all parts) of your application, and invoke it separately for each process, e.g. the program runs copies of itself to delegate tasks to.

Option 2 - threads

Create a standalone executable which starts up with a single thread and create additional threads to do some tasks

Option 3 - fork

Only available under Linux/Unix, this is a bit different. A forked process really is its own process with its own address space - there is nothing that the child can do (normally) to affect its parent's or siblings address space (unlike a thread) - so you get added robustness.

However, the memory pages are not copied, they are copy-on-write, so less memory is usually used than you might imagine.

Consider a web server program which consists of two steps:

1. Read configuration and runtime data
2. Serve page requests

If you used threads, step 1 would be done once, and step 2 done in multiple threads. If you used "traditional" processes, steps 1 and 2 would need to be repeated for each process, and the memory to store the configuration and runtime data duplicated. If you used fork(), then you can do step 1 once, and then fork(), leaving the runtime data and configuration in memory, untouched, not copied.

So there are really three choices.

That depends on a lot of factors. Processes are more heavy-weight than threads, and have a higher startup and shutdown cost. Interprocess communication (IPC) is also harder and slower than interthread communication.

Conversely, processes are safer and more secure than threads, because each process runs in its own virtual address space. If one process crashes or has a buffer overrun, it does not affect any other process at all, whereas if a thread crashes, it takes down all of the other threads in the process, and if a thread has a buffer overrun, it opens up a security hole in all of the threads.

So, if your application's modules can run mostly independently with little communication, you should probably use processes if you can afford the startup and shutdown costs. The performance hit of IPC will be minimal, and you'll be slightly safer against bugs and security holes. If you need every bit of performance you can get or have a lot of shared data (such as complex data structures), go with threads.

Others have discussed the considerations.

Perhaps the important difference is that in Windows processes are heavy and expensive compared to threads, and in Linux the difference is much smaller, so the equation balances at a different point.

Once upon a time there was Unix and in this good old Unix there was lots of overhead for processes, so what some clever people did was to create threads, which would share the same address space with the parent process and they only needed a reduced context switch, which would make the context switch more efficient.

In a contemporary Linux (2.6.x) there is not much difference in performance between a context switch of a process compared to a thread (only the MMU stuff is additional for the thread). There is the issue with the shared address space, which means that a faulty pointer in a thread can corrupt memory of the parent process or another thread within the same address space.

A process is protected by the MMU, so a faulty pointer will just cause a signal 11 and no corruption.

I would in general use processes (not much context switch overhead in Linux, but memory protection due to MMU), but pthreads if I would need a real-time scheduler class, which is a different cup of tea all together.

Why do you think threads are have such a big performance gain on Linux? Do you have any data for this, or is it just a myth?