Multitasking refers to the ability to perform several different activities at the same time in a single Linux computing environment. Many jobs that we perform in our day to day duties when running a Linux system can be performed sequentially, that is, one after the other. Jobs that can be run in a very short amount of time or that require an intense period of resource usage that needs to run as a single large process using all computing resources can be run one after another without the need for multitasking. Jobs that are particularly long running that run on a different computer or several different computers even, such as in a grid environment, are good candidates for multitasking. Defragmenting your disk drive or running a search for a particular query string on your local hard drive are examples of long running local jobs that can be multitasked while running other tasks. Jobs such as long database queries or batch loads onto a remote server are examples of jobs that are controlled in a single session, but can be multitasked in a Linux environment so several of these sessions can be run at the same time.
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