python threads

[Ype Kingma]

curt finch wrote:
> 
> We ship a web application completely written in python.
> 
> The application server daemon that sits between apache/IIS and the
> dbserver would like to take advantage of multi-chip architectures
> and have many threads.  Each thread would be owned by a logged
> in user with it's own db connection and share cached db data with
> other threads.

I assume you select on sockets.

> 
> My understanding is that python's current threads implementation
> does not really allow for this in the sense that only one thread
> can be running at a time, regardless of the number of chips on
> the machine, and additionally that the threads cannot really
> interrupt each other and still maintain correct state.
> 
> Is that all correct?
> 

It is correct for CPython, as others explained.

It is not correct for Jython. which uses java threads.

You might consider porting to Jython in case you have the
non blocking I/O in java available (java 1.4 iirc).
This will require a rewrite of the socket and socket select
using code on top of java's non blocking I/O package,
so it might not be feasible now.
Perhaps someone from Zope has some experience doing this...

Regards,
Ype