Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By : Quan Nguyen
Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By: Quan Nguyen

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages, with numerous libraries and frameworks that facilitate high-performance computing. Concurrency and parallelism in Python are essential when it comes to multiprocessing and multithreading; they behave differently, but their common aim is to reduce the execution time. This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to various advanced concepts in concurrent engineering and programming. Mastering Concurrency in Python starts by introducing the concepts and principles in concurrency, right from Amdahl's Law to multithreading programming, followed by elucidating multiprocessing programming, web scraping, and asynchronous I/O, together with common problems that engineers and programmers face in concurrent programming. Next, the book covers a number of advanced concepts in Python concurrency and how they interact with the Python ecosystem, including the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Finally, you'll learn how to solve real-world concurrency problems through examples. By the end of the book, you will have gained extensive theoretical knowledge of concurrency and the ways in which concurrency is supported by the Python language
Table of Contents (22 chapters)

The concept of a process

In the field of computer science, a process of execution is an instance of a specific computer program or software that is being executed by the operating system. A process contains both the program code and its current activities and interactions with other entities. Depending on the operating system, the implementation of a process can be made up of multiple threads of execution that can execute instructions concurrently or in parallel.

It is important to note that a process is not equivalent to a computer program. While a program is simply a static collection of instructions (program code), a process is instead the actual execution of those instructions. This also means that the same program could be run concurrently by spawning multiple processes. These processes execute the same code from the parent program.

For example, the internet browser Google...