Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Threads

Python has another local parallelization library—thread. The thread objects it provides are created and used in much the same way that multiprocessing.Process objects are, but thread-based processes run in the same memory space as the parent process, while Process objects, when they are started, actually create a new Python interpreter instance (with some connection capabilities to the parent Python interpreter).

Because threads run in the same interpreter and memory space, they are not capable of accessing multiple processors the same way that a Process can.

A thread's access to multiple CPUs on a machine is a function of the Python interpreter that's used to run the code. The standard interpreter that ships with Python (Cpython) ...