Explain multithreading vs multiprocessing
Company: Anthropic
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
In the context of implementing a crawler, answer the following:
1. What is the difference between **multithreading** and **multiprocessing**?
2. How do these relate to running on a **multi-core CPU**?
3. For a network crawler, when would you prefer threads vs processes?
4. What are common pitfalls (e.g., race conditions, deadlocks, overhead), and how do you mitigate them?
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of concurrency and parallelism, specifically multithreading versus multiprocessing, their interaction with multi-core CPUs, and recognition of common concurrency pitfalls such as race conditions, deadlocks, and overhead.