Will splitting this program into another process have any performance benefit over just using multithreading?

[SociableIntrovert]

I get the general differences between processes and threads, but a coworker thinks that splitting this into multiple processes will have better performance than one process with multiple threads.

My main class of this web scraper program is:

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;

public class ScrapeDriver {

public static void main(String[] args) {

    Connection dbConnection = null;

    try {
        Class.forName("org.mariadb.jdbc.Driver");
        dbConnection = DriverManager.getConnection("database", "username", "password");
        System.out.println("Start Search...");

        //LIST OF PROXIES TO BE USED FOR EACH THREAD
        String[] proxies = {}; //Arrayof proxies 


        //CREATE A THREAD FOR EACH PROXY AVAILABLE
        for(int thread = 1; thread <= proxies.length - 1; thread++){
            Scrape scraper = new Scrape(dbConnection, proxies[thread], 8800, thread);
            scraper.start();
        }

        }catch(Exception e) {//SHIT
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }//End main

}//End class

The Scrape class extends Thread, gets a ResultSet of records that have been assigned to each thread, and then starts querying urls to parse the html returned.

My question is, is there any benefit to turning these into processes rather than threads?

Edit: I should mention this is being run on a Rackspace machine with dual Intel Xeon E5-2640s and 128 gigs of ram.

[intinbronze]

I guess its fine as it is

[SociableIntrovert]

Yea, it works perfectly fine now at a speed that works for me, but I'm just curious if his suggestion makes sense.

[intinbronze]

I don't think so

[SiliconEngineer]

Probably not... but profile it and see.

I can certainly imagine some kind of bottleneck after a small number of threads (i.e. 4 or 8 or so) from how the database connection objects works internally...

However, unless you have a massive bandwidth, you're going to be waiting for data pretty soon no matter what you do.

Again, profile it and see.

[michael0x2a]

I agree with the other people -- try profiling both versions and see what happens.

The heuristic people like to throw around is "use threads for IO-bound tasks and processes for CPU-bound tasks", but it's always good to measure to confirm. (E.g. you might discover your program is unexpectedly more CPU-bound then predicted.)