Processes Glossary

Browse 14 processes terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

14 Processes Terms

Background Process
A process that runs independently of a foreground request or interactive session, often handling scheduled, long-running, or deferred work. Background...
Daemon
Daemon is a background process that runs continuously on a computer system without direct user interaction, performing system-level tasks or waiting to handle...
Decision Tree Culture
A culture that relies heavily on branching decision guides, rules, and procedural logic for handling recurring situations. This can improve consistency, but it...
Fast Lane
A prioritized path or process designed to move some requests, fixes, or decisions more quickly than the normal queue. In work culture fast lanes can be helpful...
Fork Bomb
A denial-of-service pattern where processes recursively spawn more processes until the system exhausts its resources. The term is especially associated with...
IPC
Short for inter-process communication: the mechanisms operating systems provide for separate processes to exchange data or coordinate work. Common IPC methods...
ITSM
Short for IT service management, the discipline of delivering and controlling IT services through processes such as incident management, change management,...
Kill Process
To stop a running process, usually spoken casually in incident and debugging work. In engineering slang, 'kill the process' can be ordinary triage or a sign...
Operations
The function and set of activities that keep the business running, including process management, systems, logistics, support workflows, and internal...
Process Execution
The launching and running of a program or command on a system, including its arguments, parent process, privileges, and child behavior. Process execution is...
Process Kill
The act of terminating a running process, either intentionally during ops work or as part of failure handling. In engineering slang, a process kill is simple...
Process Security
The protection built into business and technical processes so they cannot be abused, bypassed, or manipulated to create security failures. Process security...
Spawning
The act of creating a new process, thread, or concurrent task from a parent context. On Unix, process spawning typically involves fork+exec (or posix_spawn);...
Zombie Process
Zombie Process is a process in a Unix-like operating system that has finished executing but still has an entry in the process table because its parent process...

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