On Jan 4, 3:31 pm, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > In article > <2ebc11a5-1b45-4faa-97b9-c84f0db01...@k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>, > > Fuzzyman <fuzzy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > It is unsafe to terminate an os level thread at an arbitrary point > > because it may be executing code in a critical section. > > [...] > > The standard advice is to use a flag and do manual checking to abort > > threads. This only works for fine grained operations and *doesn't* > > work for very coarse grained operations or where there aren't > > convenient places to check the flag. > > Another possibility is to not use threads! If you > > 1) Need asynchronous operation > > 2) Need iterruptability > > 3) Can't poll for an "please stop" signal > > You should look at running your "thread" as a separate process, which > you can send a kill signal to when you want it to go away. You can then > communicate with it via pipes, sockets, shared memory segments, whatever. > > Threads are a wonderful invention, but they are not a panacea for all > possible parallelism tasks. Sometimes they're just the wrong tool.
However some tasks / algorithms are done much better with threads than processes. Asynchronous operations are good for IO bound concurrency but not for CPU bound concurrency. Michael Foord -- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
