Entry

Why is my pipe i/o thread blocking the other threads? Any answers?

Jul 23rd, 2000 06:05
unknown unknown, Richard Brodie

There is a global lock within Python, protecting its internals. When you
call out from a Python to a C extension method in a thread, the thread
holds the lock.
For maximum parallelism, and particularly if you're doing blocking I/O
in a thread, you need to release and reaquire the lock.
See: http://www.python.org/doc/current/api/threads.html for details.
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This is only a solution if the problem occurs when using a non-standard 
extension module (ie, a Python module implemented in C/C++).  The 
statement "you need to release and reaquire the lock" is misleading - 
you can _not_ do this from Python code - only C code can do this.