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multitaskingsearch for term

The ability of a computer, operating system, or application to perform (or appear to perform) more than one task or operation at the same time. For example, a multitasking operating system might let you simultaneously use your computer system to download information from a remote computer with a modem, print out a word processing file, and sort a data base.This is usually done by time-slicing the execution of individual processes and performing a context switch each time a process is swapped in or out - supported by special-purpose hardware in some computers. Most operating systems support multitasking, but it can be costly if the need to switch large caches or execution pipelines makes context switching expensive in time.

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