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)

Solutions to starvation

Through an analysis of different approaches to the readers-writers problem, you have seen the key to solving starvation: since some threads will be starved if they are not given a high priority in accessing the shared resources, implementing fairness in the execution of all of the threads will prevent starvation from occurring. Fairness, in this case, does not require a program to forgo any order or priority that it has imposed on the different threads; but to implement fairness, a program needs to ensure that all threads are given sufficient opportunities to execute their instructions.

Keeping this idea in mind, we can potentially address the problem of starvation by implementing one (or a combination) of the following approaches:

  • Increasing the priority of low-priority threads: As we did with the writer threads in the second approach and the reader threads...