Thread limits?

[Tim Peters]

[Quasimodo]
> Pretty new to Python, and was messing about with multi-threading
> (also new).
>
> Is there a theoretical limit to the maximum number of threads that can be
> spawned?

No, but any particular platform will have a rather small *practical* limit!

> My machine (450MHz PIII, 320Mb RAM, Win98SE) tends to do it's dead-ant
> impersonation at around 1,000 threads created.  Each thread at the mo just
> sleeps for 60 seconds, but eventually each will be updating a
> database every minute and running continuously, leading me to think I'll
> be lucky running 100-200 on this machine.

If you think you need 1,000 threads, you're solving the wrong problem or
solving the right one in a doomed way <wink>.  Use the Queue (std library)
module to enter requests for work.  Spin off a small number of threads, each
structured like so:

    while 1:
        request = your_queue_object.get()  # sleeps until queue is non-empty
        request.deal_with_it()   # do whatever work it asks for

> Just wondering if anyone's got some input on any limits.

Ain't limits you're after, it's a sensible approach <wink>.

if-you-had-a-thousand-things-to-do-at-once-you'd-start-thrashing-too-ly
    y'rs  - tim