Processes

Processes and Services

Learn how to inspect, start, stop, and control Windows processes and services using PowerShell's process and service management cmdlets.

Processes and Message Passing

Learn how Erlang's lightweight processes communicate exclusively through asynchronous message passing, forming the foundation of concurrent, fault-tolerant sys…

spawn and Links

Understand how Erlang creates new processes with spawn and how links create bidirectional failure-propagation relationships between them.

Processes in Elixir

Learn how Elixir's lightweight BEAM processes enable massive concurrency through isolation and message passing.

Nginx Architecture and Worker Processes

How Nginx's master-worker process model and event-driven design deliver high concurrency with a small memory footprint.

Killing and Signaling Processes

Understand Unix signals and the kill, killall, and pkill commands to gracefully terminate or forcibly stop misbehaving processes.

Monitoring Processes with ps and top

Learn to inspect running processes with ps snapshots and the interactive top monitor, reading CPU, memory, and state columns to diagnose system load.

Understanding Processes

Learn what a process is in Linux, how it relates to programs and the kernel, key attributes like PID/PPID and process states, and the parent-child process tree.

Difference Between Process and Thread

A process is an independent program in execution with its own private memory space, while a thread is a lighter unit of execution that lives inside a process a…

What is a Deadlock?

A deadlock is a situation where a set of processes are permanently blocked because each holds a resource the others need and is waiting for a resource another…

What is a Context Switch?

A context switch is the process of saving the CPU state of a currently running task and loading the saved state of another task, so a single CPU core can appea…

What is a Zombie Process?

A zombie process is a process that has finished execution but still has an entry in the process table because its parent has not yet read its exit status.

What is Inter-Process Communication (IPC)?

Inter-process communication (IPC) is the set of mechanisms an operating system provides for separate processes — each with its own isolated address space — to…

What is a Process Control Block (PCB)?

A Process Control Block (PCB) is the kernel data structure that stores everything the OS needs to know about a process — its state, register values, memory map…

What are the Different Process States in an OS?

A process moves through a small set of states — new, ready, running, waiting (blocked), and terminated — and the OS scheduler transitions it between them based…

What Causes Context Switch Overhead and How Is It Reduced?

Context switch overhead comes from the direct cost of saving and restoring CPU state plus the indirect cost of losing cache, TLB, and pipeline warmth, and it i…

How Does Process Creation and the Process Hierarchy Work?

A process is created when an existing parent process calls a system call like fork (Unix) or CreateProcess (Windows), producing a child process with its own PI…

How Does Process Termination Work in an OS?

Process termination happens either voluntarily, when a process calls exit() after finishing or hitting an unrecoverable error, or involuntarily, when the OS or…

CPU-Bound vs I/O-Bound Processes: What Is the Difference?

A CPU-bound process spends most of its time performing computation and rarely blocks, while an I/O-bound process spends most of its time waiting on disk, netwo…

What is a Light-Weight Process (LWP)?

A light-weight process (LWP) is a kernel-schedulable entity that acts as a bridge between a user-level thread library and the kernel, letting many user threads…