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GIL in the new glossary

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters mertz at gnosis.cx
Thu Oct 2 16:40:52 EDT 2003 
"Luis P Caamano" <lpc at racemi.com> wrote previously:
|Although I understand this is possible and how it works, it still
|doesn't help me at all if all I write is python code.  My multi-threaded
|program works great, I take it to a big HP SuperDome with lots of
|processors and it just doesn't scale at all.

True enough.  But in many cases, there are other ways to utilize
multiprocessing, using pure-Python.

This has come up lots of times, and you can find some old threads (of
the c.l.py kind, not the posix kind :-)).  But in general, the strategy
is to use some form of IPC, and launch many Python processes.  Each
Python iterpreter can get run in its own processor, and partial
calculations/results exchanged as needed.  Various libraries help you
support this.

Admittedly, this is not the absolutely most memory/CPU friendly
technique possible... but then, Python isn't to start with.  If you
really need to scrape out every last CPU cycle, use C, OCaml, Fortran,
or assembly.

Yours, Lulu...

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