ReferenceGlossary
Green threads
Lightweight threads that a language runtime schedules instead of the operating system. Goroutines, Java virtual threads, and Erlang processes are examples. Each costs a few KB, so one server can keep many thousands waiting at once.
Runtimes
In Quorum#
Go and Elixir's BEAM run green threads on every core, and a waiting request holds no worker slot. Each open Realtime connection costs 10 KB on Go and 5 KB on BEAM, against 1 MB for a Java thread on Tomcat. BEAM is preemptive, so no request stalls another, but its CPU is less than half as fast as Go's.
Read next#
Async I/O, Event loop, GIL (global interpreter lock), Thread pool