a soft real-time system using python

[anton wilson]

On Wednesday 31 July 2002 12:33 pm, anton wilson wrote:
> O
>
> > A realtime system places an upper bound on all operations, but the very
> > nature of Python makes this impractical if not impossible.
> >
> > An interaction between Python's handling of the GIL and the platform's
> > pthread library is going to be the least of your problems if you
> > actually intend to deliver a system which gives realtime guarantees on
> > Python programs.
> >
> > Jeff
>
> If the soft-real-time system we use makes simple function calls and only
> uses simple datatypes and possibly tuples, what are some of the potential
> pitfalls we could run into? I understand the deallocation issue and the
> garbage collection issue. (Does garbage collection have to be enabled?) Can
> we somehow get an idea on the worse case time delays in python using only
> simple function calls and assignments with small tuples and simple
> datatypes?


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.

Anton