performance of script to write very long lines of random chars

[Robert Kern]

On 2013-04-11 17:35, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> On 11 April 2013 11:50, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:47:43 +0100, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>>
>>> On 11 April 2013 08:47, Steven D'Aprano
>>> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One thing to be aware of: urandom may run out of entropy, and then it
>>>> will slow down a lot. If you don't care about cryptographic randomness,
>>>> you could use this instead:
>>>
>>> Reading this I'm realising that I don't really know what os.urandom is.
>>> How exactly is it generating random numbers and what do you mean by it
>>> running out of entropy?
>>
>> Some (most?) modern operating systems provide a cryptographically strong
>> source of non-deterministic randomness. The non-deterministic part comes
>> from external "stuff", which is called "entropy". Typical sources of
>> entropy include network events, user key-presses, moving the mouse, and
>> (presumably in machines with special hardware), even thermal noise in
>> electrical components.
>
>> Entropy is used and discarded, so urandom needs the OS to continually
>> replenish the amount of entropy. Under normal circumstances, this it
>> does, but if you grab lots of urandom output on a system which is
>> otherwise quiet and not doing anything, it could run out.
>
> Okay, so I understand what entropy is in the thermodynamic sense and
> also in the mathematical (Shannon) sense but I'm still confused about
> what it means that the OS is somehow storing entropy. Do you mean that
> it is always maintaining a buffer of what it considers to be random
> bytes that it slowly builds up from noise that is made accessible to
> the OS from the hardware?

Yes.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco