Question

Explain five differences between a fork and thread

Answer 1

Solution:

Fork	Thread
A fork is used for giving a new process which itself is the copy of current process having code segment same as current process with separate memory space.	A process can have multiple threads ,and the execution of all the threads of any process takes place parallely
There is no shareing of memory between the two processes (because they both have different behaviour),So both the processes are assigned separate memory.	There is no separate memory for threads ,memory and all other resouces are shared between the threads.So we can easily access shared data
Forks look same as the parent process but they have different process id and separate memory	Threads have unique thread id and same process id
The file lock that the parent process has set ,the child process does not inherit it	File locks set by parent process is also inherited by thread
Forking result in more overhead when compared to threads because we have to assign new separate memory and environment for the process	Thread has less overhead when compared to forking because thread does not require any separate memory and environment for the process execution
fork are the copy of parent process so it look same as the parent process	Thread is a light weigted process
forking is faster as their is no need of context switching	Threads are slow because we need to perform context switching between the threads while execution. It is faster in case of multithreaded system
The portability of fork is more when compared to threads	Threads are less portable than fork
Debugging of code is easy on fork	Debugging is hard in threads
The crash of one process does not affect other process	The crash in one affect the other because they have same memory space
forking is more secure than threading due to separate memory space	Threading is less secure than fork because of shared memory
Inter process communivcation is costly in forks	Interprocess communication between threads is easy and less costly
Forking is easy to program when compared to threads	Threads are hard to program

Note: If you dont need all the above differences mentioned,you can choose any five differences that you want

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