Leveraging Concurrency for Performance

Concurrency can improve performance, but only when it matches the problem: waiting on I/O, parallelizable CPU work, or throughput-oriented pipelines. It can also make systems slower when it adds contention, coordination, or unnecessary thread hopping.

This section connects Clojure’s concurrency tools (futures, agents, pmap, core.async, and the STM tools you learned earlier) to the performance problems they actually solve.

You will learn how to reason about overhead, backpressure, and the difference between making one request faster and making the whole system handle more work safely.

In this section

• Parallel Processing with pmap: Leveraging Concurrency for Performance in Clojure
  Explore how to use pmap and other parallel processing functions in Clojure to efficiently utilize multiple CPU cores for computationally intensive tasks.
• Asynchronous Processing in Clojure: Boosting Performance with Concurrency
  Explore how asynchronous programming in Clojure, using core.async, enhances performance by managing tasks concurrently without blocking threads. Learn to leverage Clojure's unique concurrency features for efficient asynchronous processing.
• Effective Use of Atoms and Agents in Clojure Concurrency
  Master the use of Atoms and Agents in Clojure to manage state efficiently in concurrent applications, minimizing contention and synchronization overhead.