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

The life of a process


Within the multiprocessing module, we have three distinct methods of starting processes within our Python programs:

  • Spawn
  • Fork
  • Forkserver

While you may never call upon this knowledge while you are crafting your multiprocess programs in Python, it's worthwhile to know how the underlying mechanisms work, and how they differ from one operating system to another.

Note

I'd recommend that you check out the official Python documentation which can be found here: https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/multiprocessing.html#contexts-and-start-methods.

Starting a process using fork

Forking is the mechanism used on Unix systems in order to create child processes from the parent process. These child processes are almost identical to their parent process and similar to the real world: children inherit all of the resources available to the parent.

The fork command is a standard system command found in the Unix ecosystem.

Spawning a process

By spawning a separate process, we spin up a second distinct...