a soft real-time system using python

[Peter Hansen]

anton wilson wrote:
> 
> For further information, we're already having a certain problem where python
> threads seem to drastically decrease performance in the middle of the program
> for around a second. Garbage collection has been disabled, but it's possible
> that there is some other behind-the-scenes work that Python is doing. What
> other things should we be worrying about? I need a more complete
> understanding of what can happen or is happening that would affect consistent
> running of a python program.

Do you want consistency or simply a high likelihood that operations will
complete within some soft upper limit?  The latter is soft realtime, the former
is something different.

By the way, I don't think you've mentioned yet which platform you are running
on.  If the underlying platform is not itself realtime, you might be seeing
effects from it, rather than from Python itself.  We certainly found lengthier
pauses in our applications running under NT and (obviously) 98 than we have
under Linux for similar hardware...

-Peter