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)

An overview of the multiprocessing module

The multiprocessing module is one of the most commonly used implementations of multiprocessing programming in Python. It offers methods to spawn and interact with processes using an API similar to the threading module (as we saw with the start() and join() methods in the preceding example). According to its documentation website, the module allows both local and remote concurrency and effectively avoids the global interpreter lock (GIL) in Python (which we will discuss in more detail later in Chapter 15, The Global Interpreter Lock) by using subprocesses instead of threads.

The process class

In the multiprocessing module, processes are typically spawned and managed through the Process...