I realize there are lots of special cases and exceptions to what I'm about to say but I've come to 2 good general rules of thumb when it comes to designing conc

I realize there are lots of special cases and exceptions to what I'm about to say but I've come to 2 good general rules of thumb when it comes to designing concurrency: 1. prefer processes over threads -- because your architecture can scale horizontally across multiple boxes easier, because you become free to write each piece in a different language, and because mutable shared memory is problematic in very subtle, counter-intuitive ways 2. prefer events over processes or threads -- because you can handle much higher concurrent IO traffic on a single machine, due in part to reduced memory use