Calvin Spealman wrote: > I repeat this all the time, but the best advice I can give you about > using threads is to not use threads at all.
Might as well get with the times and ignore that advice. > I would point you to good > references like Threads Considered Harmful > (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/18/22112/860) Note that it's "poster boy" for multiple processes now uses multiple threads. > and The Problem > with Threads > (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.html > - With Link to PDF). The author's alternatives to threads are not available in Python. Many Pythoners do similar things with threads, such as use the message-passing style via the queue module. > It might seem an inappropriate response to your > question to simply tell you that you should not do what you are asking > how to do, but its just the case that most often anyone without > exposure to threads has little or no understanding on just how bad > they are for many of the tasks they will be used for. Threads are > difficult to control, impossible to predict, and simply one of the > most over used, least understood causes of buggy, unmaintainable > software in the whole spectrum of development techniques. Threads require some study and understanding, but they work great once one learns to use them. > As alternatives, look into what tasks can spawn into other processes, Unfortunately one cannot share Python objects between processes. POSH may change that, but it looks to be stuck in alpha. > asyncronous programming (a'la Twisted - > http://www.twistedmatrix.com/), I find asynchronous programming much harder to manage than threads, except for fairly simple applications where neither one is hard. > and co-routine and similar facilities, > such as the tasklets of Stackless and two-way generators now included > with Python. Those fail at simple things such as having two of them each waiting at a blocking call. -- --Bryan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
