Pour resituer le contexte voici la réponse de Guido à propos du GIL avec la venue de python 3000
Q. Multi-core processors will be standard even on laptops in the near future. Is Python 3.0 going to get rid of the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) in order to be able to benefit from this feature?
A. No. We're not changing the CPython implementation much. Getting rid of the GIL would be a massive rewrite of the interpreter because all the internal data structures (and the reference counting operations) would have to be made thread-safe. This was tried once before (in the late '90s by Greg Stein) and the resulting interpreter ran twice as slow. If you have multiple CPUs and you want to use them all, fork off as many processes as you have CPUs. (You write your web application to be easily scalable, don't you? So if you can run several copies on different boxes it should be trivial to run several copies on the same box as well.) If you really want "true" multi-threading for Python, use Jython or IronPython; the JVM and the CLR do support multi-CPU threads. Of course, be prepared for deadlocks, live-locks, race conditions, and all the other nuisances that come with multi-threaded code.
[^] # Re: Grandiose
Posté par Bozo_le_clown . En réponse au journal Linuxfr en J2EE. Évalué à 4.
Q. Multi-core processors will be standard even on laptops in the near future. Is Python 3.0 going to get rid of the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) in order to be able to benefit from this feature?
A. No. We're not changing the CPython implementation much. Getting rid of the GIL would be a massive rewrite of the interpreter because all the internal data structures (and the reference counting operations) would have to be made thread-safe. This was tried once before (in the late '90s by Greg Stein) and the resulting interpreter ran twice as slow. If you have multiple CPUs and you want to use them all, fork off as many processes as you have CPUs. (You write your web application to be easily scalable, don't you? So if you can run several copies on different boxes it should be trivial to run several copies on the same box as well.) If you really want "true" multi-threading for Python, use Jython or IronPython; the JVM and the CLR do support multi-CPU threads. Of course, be prepared for deadlocks, live-locks, race conditions, and all the other nuisances that come with multi-threaded code.
http://www.artima.com/forums/threaded.jsp?forum=106&thre(...)