On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Andres Riancho <andres.rian...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> The feature I'm specially interested in is the ability to spawn >> processes [1] instead of forking, which is not present in the 2.7 >> version of the module. > > > Can you explain what you see as the difference between "spawn" and "fork" in > this context?
Well, fork is a system call [0] where a process creates a copy of itself, usually using COW [1]. This copy receives a new process ID and is slightly dependent on the parent: they share the same address space. Spawn, and I took that from the multiprocessing 3 documentation, will create a new process without using fork(). This means that no memory is shared between the MainProcess and the spawn'ed sub-process created by multiprocessing. My goal is to prevent dead-locks and other issues [2][3] which come from forking a multithreaded program (situation I'm in right now). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28system_call%29 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write [2] See "Note that safely forking a multithreaded process is problematic." at https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/multiprocessing.html#multiprocessing.set_start_method [3] http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/threads-and-fork-think-twice-before-using-them > Are you using Windows perhaps? I don't know anything obviously > different between the two terms on Unix systems. Nope, I'm on linux > Skip > -- Andrés Riancho Project Leader at w3af - http://w3af.org/ Web Application Attack and Audit Framework Twitter: @w3af GPG: 0x93C344F3 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
