[Python-Dev] "Fixing" the new GIL

[Bill Janssen]

Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> wrote:

> 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".

Me, too :-).  Though I also do a lot of processing in pure Python...

> 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).

The old GIL is causing me a great deal of grief.  My server is heavily
threaded, and when I get a number of Python 2.6 threads doing layout
analysis, my 4 and 8 core machines turn into slow thrashers.

I'm dismayed that the backport of the new GIL work to the 2.x line has
been stopped (see issue 7753); I see a future of OS X 10.7 with
presumably 64-bit Python 2.7 on, say, 32-core machines running even more
slowly than it currently does.  That's a pretty hard-core backwards
compatibility decision.

Maybe the Mac-SIG should adopt that patch...

Bill