Processors are not going to get much faster. No higher clockspeeds are foreseen. The speed of processing will be further increasing through parallellization, engaging multiple CPU cores for handling all tasks rather than a single faster core.

 

This is but one reason for taking a closer look at the threading model in Java and the way we can do asynchronous and parallel processing as of Java 5. Another reason for my interest in asynchronous processing has to do with (perceived) performance. If an application performs a task on behalf of a user, it may block until the task is completed. The user cannot do anything until the task completes – watching the hourglass or whatever busy cursor is used. With asynchronous processing, a task which the user does not immediately require the results from can be processed in a separate thread. The perception of the user therefore is that the task is performed (or at least processed) much faster than in the synchronous case. And even though it is only perception – perception is usually all that counts!

 

Furthermore, if the task can be broken in smaller pieces that can be executed in parallel, we really can speed up the task – provided More >