[Python-Dev] Regular expressions

[Dennis Allison]

This is probably OT for [Python-dev]

I suspect that your problem is not the GIL but is due to something else.
Rather than dorking with the interpreter's threading, you probably would 
be better off rethinking your problem and finding a better way to 
accomplish your task.

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, Duncan Grisby wrote:

> On Thursday 24 November, Donovan Baarda wrote:
> 
> > I don't know if this will help, but in my experience compiling re's
> > often takes longer than matching them... are you sure that it's the
> > match and not a compile that is taking a long time? Are you using
> > pre-compiled re's or are you dynamically generating strings and using
> > them?
> 
> It's definitely matching time. The res are all pre-compiled.
> 
> [...]
> > > A quick look at the code in _sre.c suggests that for most of the time,
> > > no Python objects are being manipulated, so the interpreter lock could
> > > be released. Has anyone tried to do that?
> > 
> > probably not... not many people would have several-minutes-to-match
> > re's.
> > 
> > I suspect it would be do-able... I suggest you put together a patch and
> > submit it on SF...
> 
> The thing that scares me about doing that is that there might be
> single-threadedness assumptions in the code that I don't spot. It's the
> kind of thing where a patch could appear to work fine, but them
> mysteriously fail due to some occasional race condition. Does anyone
> know if there is there any global state in _sre that would prevent it
> being re-entered, or know for certain that there isn't?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Duncan.
> 
> 

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