On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:51:01 -0400 Dave Angel <d...@davea.name> wrote:
> On 06/15/2012 09:49 AM, John O'Hagan wrote: > > I have a program in which the main thread launches a number of CPU-intensive > > worker threads. For each worker thread two python subprocesses are started, [...] > > > > So far so good, but it occurred to me that instead of launching all these > > worker threads, I could just put their target code in separate executable > > files and launch them as subprocesses. That way there would be fewer > > threads, but each subprocess would be doing more work. > > > > My question is, on a single core machine, what are the pros and cons of > > threads vs subprocesses in a setup like this? > > [...] > > Two key phrases in your message; CPU-intensive, > single-core-machine. If these have the conventional meaning, you're > better off doing all the processing in your main executable, without > threads at all. > > Neither threads nor separate process speed up CPU-intensive execution on > a single-core machine. [...] I should have made it clear that I'm not using threads to speed anything up; each thread produces an independently controlled, timed stream of musical events. I think it would be hard to achieve that in a single process. The streams need to run simultaneously without getting out of sync or dropping notes, which begins to happen if there are a lot of them, or they are run very fast or are very calculation-intensive to produce. So I guess what I'm really asking is, given that I need to use threads or subprocesses, which approach slows the processing down the least? John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
