[issue7946] Convoy effect with I/O bound threads and New GIL

[Antoine Pitrou]

Antoine Pitrou <pitrou at free.fr> added the comment:

Dave,

> In the current implementation, threads perform a timed-wait on a
> condition variable.  If time expires and no thread switches have
> occurred, the currently running thread is forced to drop the GIL.

A problem, as far as I can see, is that these timeout sleeps run
periodically, regardless of the actual times at which thread switching
takes place. I'm not sure it's really an issue but it's a bit of a
departure from the "ideal" behaviour of the switching interval.

> A new attribute 'cpu_bound' is added to the PyThreadState structure.
> If a thread is ever forced to drop the GIL, this attribute is simply
> set True (1).  If a thread gives up the GIL voluntarily, it is set
> back to False (0).  This attribute is used to set up simple scheduling
> (described next).

Ok, so it's not very different, at least in principle, from what
gilinter.patch does, right?
(and actually, the benchmark results look very similar)

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