Whenever I open the task manager on my PC to check the status a few terms confuse me. I know what CPU, memory usage, and GHz mean, but I don’t understand “threads” and “handles”. I’ve searched online, but the explanations are too complicated. Can anyone help clear this up?
In: Technology
Lets say you have a single core CPU. It can only do one thing at a time. Yet you can still have multiple applications open, each doing their own thing at the same time. How is that possible?
Threads are the answer. Each application has its own “thread”, and the OS manages which thread is currently executing on the CPU. It can switch between these threads quickly enough that it appears as if all the programs are running at the same time.
Sometimes a single application wants to be able to do multiple things concurrently. So it’s possible for programs to spawn more threads. The “threads” count tells you how many it has.
Your CPU probably has more than 1 core, so it is possible to run more than 1 thread a time. But still, there are more threads than there are cores so it’s still necessary to have threads.
Handles are more generic. If an application needs to use a resource that’s managed by the OS it needs a handle to it so the OS can track what things each process is using. In this case handles could refer to threads, files, windows, all sorts of things. So the handle count doesn’t really tell you much specific.
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