Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

What is multithreading?

Thread is short for a thread of execution. A programmer can split his or her work into threads that run simultaneously and share the same memory context. Unless your code depends on third-party resources, multithreading will not speed it up on a single-core processor, and will even add some overhead for thread management. Multithreading will benefit from a multiprocessor or multicore machines where each thread can be executed on a separate CPU core, thus making the program run faster. This is a general rule that should hold true for most programming languages. In Python, the performance benefit from multithreading on multicore CPUs has some limits, which we will discuss later. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume ...