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)

Summary

A race condition is defined as a phenomenon during which the output of a system is indeterminate and is dependent on the scheduling algorithm and the order in which tasks are scheduled and executed. Critical sections indicate shared resources that are accessed by multiple processes or threads in a concurrent application, which can lead to unexpected, and even erroneous, behavior. A race condition occurs when two or more threads/processes access and alter a shared resource simultaneously, resulting in mishandled and corrupted data. Race conditions also have significant implications in real-life applications, such as security, operating systems, and networking.

Since the race conditions that we observed arose when multiple threads or processes accessed and wrote to a shared resource simultaneously, the key idea for solving race conditions is to isolate the execution of different...