Jython, GILs and object locking.

[kosh]

On Friday 10 October 2003 15:37, Jon Franz_antispam wrote:
> Michael Chermside <mcherm at mcherm.com> wrote:
> > Ahh... but with this YOU are going too far. Just because the
> > GIL *is* an actual problem, doesn't mean that it's a *big*
> > problem. In particular, it *IS* okay to do threaded programming
> > in python. People do it all the time, including some very
> > large applications (Zope comes to mind) that make heavy use
> > of threading.
>
> Yes, and I'm willing to bet 5$ that the Zope developers would
> love a true freethreaded interpreter, since Zope is limited on
> big hardware by the GIL-ized interpreter preventing multiple CPUs
> being used.  Using ZEO to run multiple copies of Zope localy
> on the same datastore is a silly workaround.

Actually I do zope work and I would prefer if zope stopped being threaded 
entirely and was purely multi processed and zeo was just the default way it 
was configured. Multi process scales better on the newer multiple cpu systems 
and can even scale on a mosix cluster which is a very cheap way to make cpu/
ram optimized cluster which greatly helps a lot of types of apps. 
Multithreaded apps from what I understand don't scale anywhere near as well 
on those systems and overall multithreaded apps seem less resistant to 
various problems that can occur since if you take out one thread you tend to 
take out more.

Multiple computers is cheaper then one machine with lots of cpus and if you 
use something like debian for the main box and then the knoppix cluster 
version of the rest it is easy to do. Just take another cheap box and boot it 
with the knoppix cluster cd and it is now a part of the cluster pretty much. 
No need to install anything to the hard drive and it should work fine.