[Python-Dev] Fixing the GIL (with a BFS scheduler) (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Mon May 17 20:15:49 CEST 2010

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Well, if instead of gnashing your teeth, you had contributed to the issue, perhaps a patch would have been committed by now (or perhaps not, but who knows?). If you stay silent, you cannot assume that someone else will stand up for your opinion (and the fact that nobody did could indicate that not many people care about the issue, actually).

Unfortunately, I somehow did not even know about the issue until February, after the issue had been closed. What I did know was that some of our big complicated Python multi-threaded daemons had shown puzzling resource hogging when moved from small Macs to large 8-core machines with hardware RAID and lots of memory.

But, simpleton that I am, I'd presumed that threading in Python wasn't broken, and was looking elsewhere for the cause.

Python works reasonably well on multicore hardware, especially if you don't run spinning loops and if you're not on Mac OS X.

I'm not sure what you mean by "spinning loops".

But I am on Mac OS X, along with an increasing percentage of the world. And I'm dismayed that there's no momentum to fix this problem. Not a good sign.

Bill

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