What is the difference between multi-threading, multi-processing, and multi-tasking?

Question

Accepted Answer

Multi-threading, multi-processing and multi-tasking are different ways of achieving parallelism in computing.

Multi-threading is a technique of dividing a single process into multiple threads that can run concurrently.
Multi-processing is a technique of dividing a single process into multiple processes that can run concurrently.
Multi-tasking is a technique of running multiple processes or tasks concurrently on a single processor.
Multi-threading and multi-processing are used to achieve parallelism on a multi-core processor or a multi-processor system.
Multi-tasking is used to achieve parallelism on a single processor system.
Examples of multi-threading are Java threads, POSIX threads, etc.
Examples of multi-processing are fork() system call in Unix, multiprocessing module in Python, etc.
Examples of multi-tasking are time-sharing operating systems like Unix, Windows, etc.

Accepted Answer

Multiprocessing – A computer using more than one CPU at a time.
Multitasking – Multitasking is nothing but multiprogramming with a Round-robin scheduling algorithm.
Multithreading is an extension of multitasking.

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