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

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 17 May 2010 11:15:49 PDT
Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Could you give detailed information about this?

Since you're talking about a "big complicated Python multi-threaded
daemon", I presume you can't port it to Python 3 very quickly, but it
would be nice to know if the problem disappears with 3.2.

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

It was an allusion to Dave Beazley's first benchmarks, which merely ran
a spinning loop over several threads, and showed catastrophic
degradation under OS X.

> 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.

There /has/ been momentum in fixing it. In py3k.

Regards

Antoine.