Multiprocessing
Multiprocessing is a programming paradigm that enables concurrent execution of multiple processes, typically leveraging multiple CPU cores to improve performance for CPU-bound tasks. It involves creating separate processes with independent memory spaces, which can run in parallel on modern multi-core systems. This approach is commonly used to speed up computationally intensive operations by distributing work across available processors.
Developers should use multiprocessing when dealing with CPU-intensive tasks that can be parallelized, such as data processing, scientific computing, or machine learning model training. It's particularly valuable in Python where the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) limits true parallelism with threads, making multiprocessing essential for leveraging multiple cores effectively. Use cases include batch image processing, numerical simulations, and any scenario where splitting work across processes reduces overall execution time.