threads

[Gordon McMillan]

Eric Lee Green writes:

> Ah. Okay. So Python is doing user-land threads and not Posix
> (OS-level) threads?

Nope. Those are OS threads. It's just that there's an interpreter 
lock, which only gets released every N byte-code instructions.

Except, of course, that blocking operations (like socket I/O) will 
release the lock before doing their thing, then reacquire it to get 
the stuff back into Python.

Check the archives of the thread-SIG for more than you could ever 
possibly want to know...

> The difference between the two doesn't make a difference for my
> application, but I'd be curious to know in case I ever want to run
> this on an SMP machine (where only OS-level threads are schedulable
> on multiple processors).

Sorry. SMP won't get you any benefit at this stage.
 

- Gordon