What Is Meant By A Thread In Computer?

A thread is a part of a process but is independent in the sequence of execution with respect to the parent process. It is also called as a light weight process. The concept of thread is similar to that as a program contains many processes similarly a process can spawn many threads. Each thread works independent of each other under the process that created them and shares the same memory space.

The basic advantage of a thread is that it can perform the same functions as a process but to use threads instead processes saves a lot of system overheads. As the operating system share the memory space between different processes and to switch from one process to another, it needs to save all the memory and other information of one process and then move to other so that it can come back to the first one on its turn. But as the threads are managed by the process and share the same memory space as that of the parent process therefore it is very cheaper in terms of CPU cycles to use threads instead of process (switching from one process to another is lessened and also the effort to create a new process is saved).