multiprocessing vs thread performance

[Aaron Brady]

On Dec 29, 8:52 am, 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?

I'm running a 1.6 GHz.  I only ran 10000 empty threads and 10000 empty
processes.  The threads were the ones you wrote.  The processes were
empty executables written in a lower language, also run 100 at a time,
started with 'subprocess', not 'multiprocessing'.  The threads took
1.2 seconds.  The processes took 24 seconds.

The processes you wrote had only finished 3000 after several minutes.