multiprocessing vs thread performance

[janislaw]

On 29 Gru, 15:52, mk <mrk... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> After readinghttp://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0371/I was under
> impression that performance of multiprocessing package is similar to
> that of thread / threading. However, to familiarize myself with both
> packages I wrote my own test of spawning and returning 100,000 empty
> threads or processes (while maintaining at most 100 processes / threads
> active at any one time), respectively.
>
> The results I got are very different from the benchmark quoted in PEP
> 371. On twin Xeon machine the threaded version executed in 5.54 secs,
> while multiprocessing version took over 222 secs to complete!
>
> Am I doing smth wrong in code below? Or do I have to use
> multiprocessing.Pool to get any decent results?

Oooh, 100000 processes! You're fortunate that your OS handled them in
finite time.

[quick browsing through the code]

Ah, so there are 100 processes at time. 200secs still don't sound
strange.

JW