Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By : Elliot Forbes
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By: Elliot Forbes

Overview of this book

Python is a very high level, general purpose language that is utilized heavily in fields such as data science and research, as well as being one of the top choices for general purpose programming for programmers around the world. It features a wide number of powerful, high and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax and enable Python programmers to create. This book introduces some of the most popular libraries and frameworks and goes in-depth into how you can leverage these libraries for your own high-concurrent, highly-performant Python programs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts of concurrency needed to be able to write your own concurrent and parallel software systems in Python. The book will guide you down the path to mastering Python concurrency, giving you all the necessary hardware and theoretical knowledge. We'll cover concepts such as debugging and exception handling as well as some of the most popular libraries and frameworks that allow you to create event-driven and reactive systems. By the end of the book, you'll have learned the techniques to write incredibly efficient concurrent systems that follow best practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Multiprocessing

In this chapter, we will look at the wonders of multiprocessing in Python, and how it can answer the question of how to achieve truly parallel execution in Python.

We'll take a look at a number of topics such as the following:

  • How multiprocessing allows us to eliminate the impact of the GIL
  • The life of the processes in Python--how to spin up child processes, identify these processes, and ultimately kill them when we no longer need them
  • How to utilize the multiprocessing pool API
  • Communication and Synchronization between our multiple processes

By the end of this chapter, you will be quite comfortable writing your own programs that leverage the true parallel power of multiple processes.

Note

Thankfully, for those of you still stuck in the past, most of the concepts we are going to cover in this chapter are indeed available in Python 2.7. The multiprocessing module was introduced in version 2.6.