Chapter 7: Implementing Concurrency

So far, we have explored how to measure and improve the performance of programs by reducing the number of operations performed by the central processing unit (CPU) through clever algorithms and more efficient machine code. In this chapter, we will shift our focus to programs where most of the time is spent waiting for resources that are much slower than the CPU, such as persistent storage and network resources.

Asynchronous programming is a programming paradigm that helps to deal with slow and unpredictable resources (such as users) and is widely used to build responsive services and user interfaces (UIs). In this chapter, we will show you how to program asynchronously in Python using techniques such as coroutines and reactive programming. As we will see, the successful application of these techniques will allow us to speed up our programs without the use of specialized data structures or algorithms.

In this chapter, we will cover the following...