to py or not to py ?

[Carl J. Van Arsdall]

Robert Kern wrote:
>> Carl , what are the problems that could arise with threading ??
>>     
Because of the GIL only one thread can actually run at a time.  So if 
you are going for speed (say you have an SMP box) and your two requests 
require significant computation, you'd want each processor to take on a 
little bit of that work to get things done faster.  Now say you want 
these two to be computed simultaneously and you are using python, you 
won't get that, one thread will process and then the other will process 
as the GIL is passed around between the python threads.  Now if your 
bottleneck is IO then you are in good shape for python threads (Your 
machine only has one network port and you don't have a lot of 
computation overhead, so your single processor can serve things up 
faster than your network card can take it).

So its not problems that arise, its more like inefficiency.  Anyhow, it 
all depends on what you are trying to do and the needs of your 
application. 

-carl

-- 

Carl J. Van Arsdall
cvanarsdall at mvista.com
Build and Release
MontaVista Software