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Learning Concurrency in Python

You're reading from   Learning Concurrency in Python Build highly efficient, robust, and concurrent applications

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787285378
Length 360 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Elliot Forbes Elliot Forbes
Author Profile Icon Elliot Forbes
Elliot Forbes
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Table of Contents (13) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Speed It Up! FREE CHAPTER 2. Parallelize It 3. Life of a Thread 4. Synchronization between Threads 5. Communication between Threads 6. Debug and Benchmark 7. Executors and Pools 8. Multiprocessing 9. Event-Driven Programming 10. Reactive Programming 11. Using the GPU 12. Choosing a Solution

Understanding parallelism

In the first chapter, we covered a bit about Python's multiprocessing capabilities, and how we could use this to take advantage of more of the processing cores in our hardware. But what do we mean when we say that our programs are running in parallel?

Parallelism is the art of executing two or more actions simultaneously as opposed to concurrency in which you make progress on two or more things at the same time. This is an important distinction, and in order to achieve true parallelism, we'll need multiple processors on which to run our code at the same time.

A good analogy for parallel processing is to think of a queue for Coke. If you have, say, two queues of 20 people, all waiting to use a coke machine so that they can get through the rest of the day with a bit of a sugar rush, well, this would be an example of concurrency. Now say you were...

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