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Discussion on: Concurrency vs. Parallel vs. Async in .NET

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Scott Hannen

What I'm beginning to realize is that, as if this wasn't confusing enough, the common use of these terms in the scope of .NET programming is not quite the same as their common meaning. That's unfortunate because using the same terms to describe different things undermines the reason why we have terms.

Specifically, most scenarios involving concurrency in a .NET application involve multiple threads. In the broader sense concurrency does not require multiple threads, but the purpose of all the classes in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace (like ConcurrentQueue) is to support multiple concurrent threads.

When a website handles multiple requests and uses multiple threads, that is both concurrent and parallel. The use of multiple threads really fits the definition of "parallel," but if you google ".net parallel web requests" the results all describe distributing the work of making requests, not receiving them.

I qualified the post as being .NET-specific, but this means I have to qualify it even more.