Re: To thread or not to thread

On 2005-07-28, Sidd <iamsidd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I was recently reading an article on threading in python and I
> came across Global Interpreter Lock,now as a novince in python
> I was cusrious about
>
> 1.Is writing a threaded code in python going to perform well
> than a normal python code.

It's sort of a corrolary to Amdahls law: on a single CPU
machine, optimally written multi-threaded code will always
perform worse than optimally written single-threaded code.
[Where performance is in terms of CPU efficiency.]

However, it may be very difficult to write optimal
single-threaded code, and much easier to write (nearly) optimal
multi-threaded code. So, in practice, multi-threaded code
often performs better for certain classes of problems.

> If so on what basis can it performance be measured.

That's up to whoever is doing the measuring.

> 2.Is writing a threaded code in python better than a code
> written in C/C++ using PTHREADS.

Define "better".

On a multi-CPU machine you can get much more parallelism for
compute-intensive tasks using C/pthreads than you can using
Python threads.

It's also a lot easier to write buggy code containing race
conditions using C/pthreads.

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