[Python-Dev] "Fixing" the new GIL

[Cameron Simpson]

On 13Mar2010 23:03, Martin v. L�wis <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
| > Any thoughts?
| 
| My initial reaction to this report, and still my current opinion is:
| This issue is not a problem.
| It's a boundary case, so it's not clear whether Python should be able to
| deal with it gracefully. I doubt it's a realistic case.

How was it tripped over?

Speaking for myself, I have an app with a daemon mode which I expect
will sometimes behave as described; it answers requests and thus has I/O
bound threads waiting for requests and dispatching replies, and threads
doing data handling, which make constant use of the zlib library. On the
client side the same app is often throughput bound by a data examination
process that is compute bound; I can easily see it having compute bound
threads and I/O bound threads talking to daemon instances.

Currently all the above is somewhat "batchy"; the client end looks like
an archiving command line tool, but it's intended to have a FUSE mode to
present the archive as a filesystem; that I can imagine tripping over
this issue as a user uses the filesystem for "stuff".

Still, it is unusual and I suspect it will self limit to an extent
anyway; I can't fairly claim to have had it cause me trouble yet.
(Indeed, I've not used the new GIL at all - it's mostly using python
2.6).

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

I very strongly suggest that you periodically place ice packs over the abused
areas.  - Steve Garnier