From: mal at lemburg.com (M.-A. Lemburg)
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 09:00:12 GMT
Subject: Python on multiple processor machines
References: <7dv7t7$h96$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
Message-ID: <371C421C.7610BAB4@lemburg.com>
Content-Length: 1289
X-UID: 940                                                  

max at rightworks.com wrote:
> 
> I would like to hear some insights to running Python apps on multi-processor
> machines.  We are developing an app a good deal of it in Python and there are
> those amoungst us who predict that the Python interpreter would be forced to
> effectively serialize it's processing in order to be thread safe if running
> on a multi-processor machine.  We could run multiple interpreters, but this
> wouldn't provide the kind of scalability we need, and implies other problems
> of dispatching etc.  Our application does web based catalog management.  I
> need facts to keep me from becoming a Java programmer. thanks, max

Don't know what platform you use, but on Unix you can easily get away
with implementing a multi process model. Communication would be done
via shared memory or sockets. The latter even buys you clustering in
case IO should become a bottleneck.

As for free threading, Greg Stein is working on that idea:
http://www.lyra.org/~greg/ (I think it was).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg                               Y2000: 255 days left
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