The Python Concurrency Story (Part 1)

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One great thing about writing software for a living is that it keeps me humble. I used to think I was pretty smart, and was getting a little smug about it. Until I started writing code every day. It's like there is a Tiny God Of Heisenbugs, lurking and waiting for me to start thinking too highly of myself... until I slip in a bug that takes me three hours to figure out. And then, one line of code to fix.

Of course, for a lot of us, an ongoing source of humility is concurrency. From now on, as pro software engineers, we have to think about and understand concurrency very well, whether we like it or not. This requires developing the mental models to reason about it clearly, then mastering the software tools we have to finish the job. And, ideally, learning to encounter fewer of those three-hour-one-line bugs over time.

While the underlying principles are universal, the details of how we implement software depend a lot on the language we use. Each language has its own abstractions, syntax, and library support for implementing concurrent systems. This is the language's concurrency story... its world view, in a sense, of how to deal with many things happening all at once. And in the 21st century, your understanding of that story gives you an important advantage.

The language with the most expressive concurrency story is probably C.¹ It lets you implement concurrent systems that truly push the limit of what is physically possible with a computer. You have things like the clone() system call on Linux, which is so low-level it is actually used to implement threads. Take that, virtual machines!

Higher-level languages generally don't give you that level of freedom, in return for making many other things much, much easier. Stock PHP, for example, doesn't let you create threads at all; and fanning out at the process level is a lot of work. We're coding in Python, not PHP - thank heavens - which has a very fascinating concurrency story all of its own. By fully understanding it, you will be among the top 1% of Python programmers in the world.

To get there, it helps to be really clear on the concurrency primitives modern operating systems give Python to work with. Understanding that will not only make you a better programmer in Python, it will make you a better developer in every language for the rest of your life.

How cool is that! Are you excited? I'm excited. Let's get started!

(By the way, the most exciting part is a ways down - where we talk about when threads are not really threads. You'll see what I mean when you get there.)

Processes and Threads

Let's start with the basics. Modern operating systems provide two ways to organize a thread of execution. A process is simply a running program. A thread is a unit of activity within a process. This gives us the two basic first choices for how to implement a concurrent system: we can do it as N processes, or N threads.

If you peer deep under the hood, threads and processes actually have a lot of similarities. In fact, in Linux, the aforementioned clone() system call is used to create both processes and threads; the function is just invoked with different options for each.

The main difference in practice is in what they share, and don't share. If a process creates two child processes, they each have their own memory; it is not shared. (By default - there are options to change this.) In contrast, a new thread will not only share the memory of its parent process, but also share file descriptors, the filesystem context, and signal handling.

There are some real benefits to using multiple threads instead of multiple processes. Threads are much more lightweight, memory-wise. A daemon spawning 10 child processes that don't share memory, versus another spawning 10 threads that do, is obviously going to have a larger footprint. In addition, communication and synchronization between threads is streamlined compared to processes. Any communication between two process requires an IPC call, by definition, thus incurring the expense of trapping into the kernel. To share memory between processes is possible, but takes more work than with threads².

The Tragedy of Threads

In short, of the two concurrency models - multiple threads versus multiple processes - threads let you write higher performance applications, in theory.

Uh oh. Did I just say "in theory"? Yes I did. And that leads us into the downside: writing bug-free multithreaded code is hard. You will encounter a wide range of subtle, baffling bugs that are easy to reproduce if you are lucky... and hard to reproduce if you are not. Race conditions, deadlocks, live locks, and more.

The cost of this is development time. Safe thread programming involves disciplined use of synchronization primitives like locks and mutexes. As a good software engineer, using these is a skill set that you will need to develop at some point, if you have not already. But it is always nice when you don't have to go down that path.

(Wait, was that foreshadowing? I think it was...)

Aside from all of this, there is another factor to consider - one that is specific to Python's concurrency story. The fact is, a Python thread isn't exactly what it appears to be.

When Threads Aren't Really Threads

The threads we are talking about above are actually OS threads. This is what you get, when writing an application in C, if you call pthread_create (OS X, Linux) or CreateThread (Windows). It is a real thread allocated and managed by the operating system kernel. But when you create a thread in a high level language, like Python, that isn't necessarily what you get - at least, not exactly.

In modern Python, you start a thread by creating an instance of threading.Thread, then invoking its start() method. A started thread indeed allocates a separate OS thread (on most platforms³.) The difference: two OS threads can run at the same time - fully utilizing separate cores or CPUS. But generally speaking, two Python threads cannot run at the same time.

This is due to the global interpreter lock, a.k.a. the GIL. This is a mechanism within the standard Python implementation allowing only one thread to run Python bytecode at a time⁴. Even when running on a 128-core beast of a machine, in a typical multithreaded Python program, at any given moment, only one of them can be used.⁵

While it seems bad at first, it turns out that for most engineering domains, the GIL is not a significant restriction at all. From a pure CPU-performance perspective⁶, Python threads are indeed somewhat hobbled compared to OS threads. But Python processes are wholly unaffected by the lock, which is our outlet and our salvation for CPU-bound tasks. That's what we discuss in part 2.