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using threads with python and winnt

Tim Peters tim_one at email.msn.com
Tue Jan 25 03:19:08 EST 2000 
[Matthew Miller]
> Maybe in the heat of the moment I was overly glib about Win9x
> and python threading ...

There's an exceedingly rare timing hole in the released 1.5.2 Python (fixed
in the CVS version) that had been there for years, showing up in rare
reports under extremely high rates of thread death and only on top-end
multiprocessor systems.

Now I had never seen a threading problem under Python on my uniprocessor
Win95, but constructed a program to provoke this error after finding some
*suspicious* code in Python "by eyeball".  In the course of tracking it down
and verifying Guido's fix, I chewed through hundreds of thousands of
threads, with several hundred active simultaneously, over a period of
nonstop days and in a program designed to be as stressful as possible.  No
problems at all on Win95.

Threads are one thing Windows does very well (indeed, I never worked on a
Unix(tm) system I didn't write <wink> where threads were a tenth as
reliable).  So I'd look for the cause of your problems elsewhere -- luckily
<wink>,  there are *plenty* of other places to look under Windows.

e.g.-try-unplugging-the-keyboard<wink>-ly y'rs  - tim
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