Process vs Threads

A process is an executing instance of an application. For example when you double click on a word program, a new process starts. When a process starts, a separate memory area is created for that process.

A process consists of several executable programs called threads, that works together as a whole. Process are heavyweight tasks and threads are light weight tasks. For example, when you start the word program, the autosave and spell check features are running in the background and these are called threads which operate on the same data set.

Threads with in the same process share the same address space. Therefore, this allows communication between threads and also allows thread to read and write to the same data structures.