What is Thread?

A thread is a flow of execution through the process code, with its own program counter, system registers and stack. A thread is also called a light weight process. Threads provide a way to improve application performance through parallelism. Threads represent a software approach to improving performance of operating system by reducing the overhead thread is equivalent to a classical process.

Each thread belongs to exactly one process and no thread can exist outside a process. Each thread represents a separate flow of control.Threads have been successfully used in implementing network servers and web server. They also provide a suitable foundation for parallel execution of applications on shared memory multiprocessors. Folowing figure shows the working of the single and multithreaded processes.