Hey guys,
Today I’d like to tell you how to use multiple threads for heavy computing purposes.
For example, we (at Immowelt) needed Multithreading to speed up our static code analysis. The old process, based on bash, took up to 30 seconds each time the pre-commit Githook triggered. As soon as we used Multithreading the process executed within 5 seconds.
At first, we need to figure which packages we need to import. To use the most simple kind of multithreading we only need the ThreadPool Module which is part of multiprocessing.pool. I also need some other modules for demonstration purposes.
Then we define all needed variables and also the heavy calculating ( 😉 ) function.
Everything is ready to go, so we start the main function.
The Main Function cover the management of the Thread Pool, start all threads, wait until every child is done and gather the information of the child threads.
- Thread Management (Line 2-4)
- The limit of concurrent threads must be set. Be careful if you produce a heavy amount of network traffic or IOPS.
- To spawn any child processes the thread pool must be defined
- If you don’t have any fire-and-forget processes all children must be known
- Start all threads (Line 7-8)
- Here we start 10 Processes which wait 10 seconds and return the needed information
- All children will be mapped in a dict object to gain their information after the thread pool is done
- Very important: at line eight (the marked one) the last argument of args= must end with a comma-sign.
- Wait until every child is done (Line 10-11)
- The <pool>.close() method tells the pool object to stop accepting new child’s.
- <pool>.join() blocks the parent until all child’s are done.
- Gather computed information of the child threads (Line 14-15)
- We iterate through the dict object and use the <child_thread>.get() method to print the return value generated by the children.
Putting it all together:
Example Output
#: python multithreading.py
0: this Process ran 9 seconds
1: this Process ran 3 seconds
2: this Process ran 2 seconds
3: this Process ran 1 seconds
4: this Process ran 5 seconds
5: this Process ran 5 seconds
6: this Process ran 1 seconds
7: this Process ran 10 seconds
8: this Process ran 2 seconds
9: this Process ran 1 seconds
Parent: this Process ran 10.0648648739 seconds