[Python-Dev] Fixing the GIL (with a BFS scheduler)

[Bill Janssen]

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> Well, if instead of gnashing your teeth, you had contributed to the
> issue, perhaps a patch would have been committed by now (or perhaps
> not, but who knows?). If you stay silent, you cannot assume that
> someone else will stand up for *your* opinion (and the fact that nobody
> did could indicate that not many people care about the issue, actually).

Unfortunately, I somehow did not even *know* about the issue until
February, after the issue had been closed.  What I did know was that
some of our big complicated Python multi-threaded daemons had shown
puzzling resource hogging when moved from small Macs to large 8-core
machines with hardware RAID and lots of memory.

But, simpleton that I am, I'd presumed that threading in Python wasn't
broken, and was looking elsewhere for the cause.

> Python works reasonably well on multicore hardware, especially if you
> don't run spinning loops and if you're not on Mac OS X.

I'm not sure what you mean by "spinning loops".

But I *am* on Mac OS X, along with an increasing percentage of the
world.  And I'm dismayed that there's no momentum to fix this problem.
Not a good sign.

Bill