[Tutor] running multiple concurrent processes

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 30 October 2012 19:18, richard kappler <richkappler at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I sit through the aftermath of Sandy, I have resumed my personal quest to
> learn python. One of the things I am struggling with is running multiple
> processes. I read the docs on threading and am completely lost so am turning
> to the most excellent tutors here (and thanks for all the help, past,
> present and future btw!).
>
> In what ways can one run multiple concurrent processes and which would be
> considered the "best" way or is that case dependent?
>
> Example:
>
> I'm working on programming a robot in Python. The bot has an Arduino board
> that receives sensor input and sends the data to a laptop which is the
> "brain" of the bot via pySerial and uses this incoming sensor data to help
> determine state. State is used in decision making. The laptop runs a program
> that we'll call the Master Control Program in a nod to Tron. The bot also
> has a chat program, computer vision, some AI it uses to mine the web for
> information, several other functions. Each of these  concurrent programs
> (thus far all python programs) must run continuously and feed data to the
> MCP which receives the data, makes decisions and sends out appropriate
> action commands such as for movement, change of state, conversation
> direction, what to research, etc.
>
> So, to return to the original question, how does one run multiple concurrent
> processes within python?

The obvious way would be to use the multiprocessing module:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/multiprocessing.html


Oscar