How do threads work in Python, and what are common Python-threading specific pitfalls?

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Yes, because of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) there can only run one thread at a time. Here are some links with some insights about this:

From the last link an interesting quote:

Let me explain what all that means.
Threads run inside the same virtual
machine, and hence run on the same
physical machine. Processes can run
on the same physical machine or in
another physical machine. If you
architect your application around
threads, you’ve done nothing to access
multiple machines. So, you can scale
to as many cores are on the single
machine (which will be quite a few
over time), but to really reach web
scales, you’ll need to solve the
multiple machine problem anyway.

If you want to use multi core, pyprocessing defines an process based API to do real parallelization. The PEP also includes some interesting benchmarks.

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