iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.

When is Multi-Threading Useful?

Multi-threading is useful for ensuring that the processor is not left around waiting for a slow process to occur. Slow processes are typically things like:

• Waiting for a user to do something, or
• When an operation depends on a slow physical process like writing data to a database.

These are the situations when multi-threading can be useful because they ensure that the processor is not left waiting around for a slow operation to complete. Instead they can be actively working on something useful.

Consider the following case:

• An HL7 interface for putting demographics into a database.
• The messages are being sent asynchronously - that is, the sender is not waiting for the ACK of the first message before sending the second.
• The operation of inserting into the database is extremely slow.

This is a good case for using multiple threading since one could have a fast thread receiving, queuing and acknowledging the messages and a slow thread doing the data base processing.