[AMD64-SMP] I can't get my cpus working at 100%

[Andrew MacIntyre]

Christian Walther wrote:

> A nice example of a program being able to do threading, but one CPU
> (core) only is python.

This is not strictly correct: Python relies on a global interpreter lock
(aka GIL) to protect internal data structures.  When code in the Python
process doesn't require access to these data structures, threads can run 
outside the influence of the lock and run simultaneously on multiple
CPUs.  Python's I/O system (eg file/network I/O) and many Python
extensions do exactly this.

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Andrew I MacIntyre                     "These thoughts are mine alone..."
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