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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon May 17 20:28:47 CEST 2010

On Mon, 17 May 2010 11:15:49 PDT Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:

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.

Could you give detailed information about this?

Since you're talking about a "big complicated Python multi-threaded daemon", I presume you can't port it to Python 3 very quickly, but it would be nice to know if the problem disappears with 3.2.

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

It was an allusion to Dave Beazley's first benchmarks, which merely ran a spinning loop over several threads, and showed catastrophic degradation under OS X.

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.

There /has/ been momentum in fixing it. In py3k.

Regards

Antoine.

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