Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
On Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:14:17 -0700, John Nagle <na...@animats.com>
declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
Multiple Python processes can run concurrently, but each process
has a copy of the entire Python system, so the memory and cache footprints are
far larger than for multiple threads.
One would think a smart enough OS would be able to share the
executable (interpreter) code, and only create a new stack/heap
allocation for data.
That's what fork is all about. (See os.fork(), available on most
Unix/Linux) The two processes start out sharing their state, and only
the things subsequently written need separate swap space.
In Windows (and probably Unix/Linux), the swapspace taken by the
executable and DLLs(shared libraries) is minimal. Each DLL may have a
"preferred location" and if that part of the address space is available,
it takes no swapspace at all, except for static variables, which are
usually allocated together. I don't know whether the standard build of
CPython (python.exe and the pyo libraries) uses such a linker option,
but I'd bet they do. It also speeds startup time.
On my system, a minimal python program uses about 50k of swapspace. But
I'm sure that goes way up with lots of imports.
DaveA
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