What is the difference between Light-weight process and heavyweight process?

Answer 1

Light weight process are the process are the processes which is considered for the os as less burden like thread.means the threads are executing inside a process which share the same code and data also memory space of a single process that's it has a less burden to the os and considered as a light weight process.also the communication between the threads are much more efficient.

where as in case of a heavy weight process for doing multiple task the os has to create multiple processes which have a multiple memory address space and for communication between them they have to use inter process communication using sockets and pipe and which has more burden on the os than the threads(ligt weight processes) and hence considered as a heavy weight process

Answer 2

Each process (Linux, windows) gets own memory although this not be fully so on process switch we have to use the different CPU registers and the different memory map .this is probably to mean that a new collection of pages must be to be cache from main memory or even from disk.

Answer 3

A process is called as heavy weight process because it used its own block of memory.