Python Parallel Programming Cookbook

Using the Python threading module

Python manages a thread via the threading package that is provided by the Python standard library. This module provides some very interesting features that make the threading-based approach a whole lot easier; in fact, the threading module provides several synchronization mechanisms that are very simple to implement.

The major components of the threading module are:

• The thread object
• The Lock object
• The RLock object
• The semaphore object
• The condition object
• The event object

In the following recipes, we examine the features offered by the threading library with different application examples. For the examples that follow, we will refer to the Python distribution 3.3 (even though Python 2.7 could be used).