multi processes

[amadain]

Hi
Heres a poser. I want to start a program 4 times at exactly the same
time (emulating 4 separate users starting up the same program). I am
using pexpect to run the program from 4 separate locations accross the
network. How do I start the programs running at exactly the same time?
I want to time how long it takes each program to complete and to show
if any of the program initiations failed. I also want to check for
race conditions. The program that I am running is immaterial for this
question - it could be mysql running queries on the same database for
example. Using threading, you call start() to start each thread but if
I call start on each instance in turn I am not starting
simultaneously.
A