By now, you should have an appreciation of some of the fundamental concepts that underlie concurrent programming. You should have a grasp of threads, processes, and you'll also know some of the limitations and challenges of Python when it comes to implementing your own concurrent applications. Finally, you have also seen firsthand some of the performance improvements that you can achieve if you were to add different types of concurrency to your applications.

I should make it clear now that there is no silver bullet that you can apply to every application and see consistent performance improvements. One style of concurrent programming might work better than another depending on the requirements of your application, so in the next few chapters, we'll look at all the different mechanisms you can employ and when to employ them.

In the next chapter, we'll have a more in-depth look at the concept of concurrency and parallelism, as well as the differences between the two concepts. We'll also look at some of the main bottlenecks that constrain our concurrent systems, and you'll learn the different styles of computer system architecture, and how it can help us achieve greater performance.