How to work with the GIL

There are a few ways to deal with the GIL in your Python applications, which will be addressed as follows.

Implementing multiprocessing, rather than multithreading

This is perhaps the most popular and easiest method to circumvent the GIL and achieve optimal speed in a concurrent program. As the GIL only prevents multiple threads from executing CPU-bound tasks simultaneously, processes executing over multiple cores of a system, each having its own memory space, are completely immune to the GIL.

Specifically, considering the preceding countdown example, let's compare the performance of that CPU-bound program when it is sequential, multithreading, and multiprocessing. Navigate to the Chapter15/example3...