basic thread question

Sean DiZazzo half.italian at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 00:04:47 EDT 2009


On Aug 18, 4:58 pm, birdsong <david.birds... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 18, 3:18 pm, Derek Martin <c... at pizzashack.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 03:10:15PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > > I have some simple threaded code...  If I run this
> > > with an arg of 1 (start one thread), it pegs one cpu, as I would
> > > expect.  If I run it with an arg of 2 (start 2 threads), it uses both
> > > CPUs, but utilization of both is less than 50%.  Can anyone explain
> > > why?  
>
> > Ah, searching while waiting for an answer (the e-mail gateway is a bit
> > slow, it seems...) I discovered that the GIL is the culprate.
> > Evidently this question comes up a lot.  It would probably save a lot
> > of time on the part of those who answer questions here, as well as
> > those implementing solutions in Python, if whoever is maintaining the
> > docs these days would put a blurb about this in the docs in big bold
> > letters...  Concurrency being perhaps the primary reason to use
> > threading, essentially it means that Python is not useful for the
> > sorts of problems that one would be inclined to solve they way my code
> > works (or rather, was meant to).  It would be very helpful to know
> > that *before* one tried to implement a solution that way... especially
> > for solutions significantly less trivial than mine. ;-)
>
> > Thanks
>
> > --
> > Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/
> > GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
>
> >  application_pgp-signature_part
> > < 1KViewDownload
>
> I would still watch that video which will explain a bit more about the
> GIL.

Thank you for the video!  It's good to know, but it raises lots of
other questions in my mind.  Lots of examples would have helped.

~Sean



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