a soft real-time system using python

[Skip Montanaro]

    anton> For further information, we're already having a certain problem
    anton> where python threads seem to drastically decrease performance in
    anton> the middle of the program for around a second. 

Do you have pymalloc enabled?  If not, does your platform malloc attempt to
coalesce blocks on the free list?  Python makes lots of malloc/realloc/free
calls, so maybe your malloc implementation is going nuts.

-- 
Skip Montanaro
skip at pobox.com
consulting: http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/resume.html