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In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New Threads

Posted by kdawson on from the keeping-intel's-margins-healthy dept.

SenFo writes "To many of the people who downloaded Google Chrome last week, it was a surprise to observe that each opened tab runs in a separate process rather than a separate thread. Scott Hanselman, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses some of the benefits of running in separate processes as opposed to separate threads. A quote: 'Ah! But they're slow! They're slow to start up, and they are slow to communicate between, right? Well, kind of, not really anymore.'"

1 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Process creation slow?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I actually am looking forward to Chrome on Linux. There was an article a few years ago about some changes in the Linux kernel regarding process creation. One of the highlights was how quickly a process could be created, almost as fast as a real thread. This was very old, but it also compared Windows/Solaris process creation and showed how much faster Linux was.