Concurrency vs Parallelism: What is the difference? (Deep Dive)

Concurrency is about structure, Parallelism is about execution. Understanding Single-core multitasking vs Multi-core processing.

June 25, 2025

Codemapo

Computer Science·March 11, 2025

Memory Management: Contiguous vs Non-Contiguous Allocation

Why does my server crash? OS's desperate struggle to manage limited memory. War against Fragmentation.

#CS#OS#Memory

Memory Management: Contiguous vs Non-Contiguous Allocation

Computer Science·April 24, 2025

BFS vs DFS: Graph Traversal

Two ways to escape a maze. Spread out wide (BFS) or dig deep (DFS)? Who finds the shortest path?

#CS#Algorithm#Graph#Search

Computer Science·April 21, 2025

Quick Sort: Divide and Conquer

Fast by name. Partitioning around a Pivot. Why is it the standard library choice despite O(N²) worst case?

#CS#Algorithm#Sorting

Computer Science·May 22, 2025

Keep-Alive: Don't hang up yet

Establishing TCP connection is expensive. Reuse it for multiple requests.

#CS#Web#HTTP#Optimization

Back to List

10. Summary: What I Finally Understood

After years of trial and error, here's what crystallized for me:

Concurrency: Structural. Dealing with multiple tasks. (Works on single-core)
Parallelism: Physical. Executing multiple tasks simultaneously. (Requires multi-core)
I/O Bound: Concurrency (async) is the answer. Node.js/Nginx approach.
CPU Bound: Parallelism (multi-core) is the answer. Multiprocessing/GPU.
GIL: Python threading's Achilles heel. Bypass with multiprocessing.
Context Switching: Not free. Too many threads = more switching than working.
Modern Trend: Lightweight abstractions (Goroutines, Virtual Threads, async/await) over raw OS threads.

As Rob Pike, creator of Go, famously said:

"Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once."

The key insight is understanding your workload. Is it waiting (I/O) or computing (CPU)? Choose the right tool. More threads don't automatically mean faster code. Understanding the context and applying the appropriate concurrency/parallelism model — that's real engineering skill.