How coroutines can be faster than threads?

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I am trying to find a situation where changing multithreading to coroutines will speed up processing of the affected code section. As far as I discovered that coroutines use less CPU and Heap space comparing to threads, I still can't find the case where coroutines are faster than threads. Although I know that coroutines creation and context-switching are much cheaper than corresponding operations with threads, I've got imperceptible results in speed difference (without measuring thread creation both cases will be absolutely the same).

So, is it even possible to find a case where coroutines will faster an execution more than threads?

kotlin coroutine multithreading performance
1 Answers

One thing to note is that coroutines are vastly superior when you have lots and lots of them. You can create and execute thousands of coroutines without a second thought, if you attempted to do that via threads all the overhead associated with threads might quickly kill the host. So, this enables you to think about massive parallelization without having to manage worker threads and runnables. They also make it easy to implement asynchronous computation patterns which would be very unwieldy to implement with basic threads, like channels and actors.

Out of scope regarding your question, but still noteworthy is the genericity of the concept, as the use cases for coroutines are not just limited to asynchronous computation. The core of coroutines are suspendable functions, which for example also enables generators like you have in python, which you would not immediately connect to asynchronous programming.

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