[Baypiggies] GIL for dummies

[Alec Flett]

Well inspite of all the "this talk is not about.." - I still found this to
be tremendously helpful in understanding python behavior in a multi-core
world.
Sure, we all prefer message passing, blah blah blah, but for a lot of web
services when you're running a whole stack of forked python interpreters to
maintain some degree of parallism every once in a while you ask yourself
"where did all my memory go?" because each process is taking 30-100 Megs,
and you start to wonder "what would I get from threads?"

The last bit about GIL contention on multi-core machines is pretty
interesting too - I'm not much into systems stuff, but I really wonder if
there's room for improvement there.

Alec

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Benjamin Sergeant <bsergean at gmail.com>wrote:

> http://www.dabeaz.com/python/GIL.pdf
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