[Python-ideas] Add faster locks to the threading module?

[Cameron Simpson]

On 21Jul2010 02:51, Sturla Molden <sturla at molden.no> wrote:
| Thread synchronization with threading.Lock can be expensive. But
| consider this: Why should the active thread need to aquire a mutex,
| when it already holds one? That would be the GIL.
| 
| Instead of acqiring a lock (and possibly inducing thread swiching
| etc.), it could just deny the other threads access to the GIL for a
| while. The cost of that synchronization method would be completely
| amortized, as check intervals happen anyway.
[...]
| The usecase for this "gillock" is about the same as for a spinlock
| C. We want synchronization for a breif period of time, but don't
| want the overhead of aquiring a mutex.

But a spinlock _does_ acquire a mutex, unless I misremember.

It is just that instead of using a more expensive mutex mechanism that
deschedules the caller until available it sits there banging its head
against a very lightweight (not descheduling) mutex until it gets it;
the efficiency is entirely reliant on _all_ users of the spinlock doing
very little inside the located period.

And therein lies one of my two misgivings about this idea: users of this
must be very careful at all times to do Very Little inside the lock.
Just like a spinlock. This seems very easy to misuse.

The other misgiving is one you've already mentioned in passing:

  P.S. A gillock working like the ctypes code above is of course very
  dangerous. If a C extension releases the GIL while _Py_Ticker is
  astronomic, we have a very bad situation... But real code could try
  to safeguard against this. E.g. Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS and
  Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS could be defined to do nothing if _Py_Ticker is
  above some ridiculous threshold.

Suppose someone goes:

  with threadsafe():
    x = fp.read(1)

and the read blocks? It looks like trivial code but I think the I/O
stuff will release the GIL over a read. Now you're not safe any more.

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

The ZZR-1100 is not the bike for me, but the day they invent "nerf" roads
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