Chapter 12. The Multiprocessing and Threading Modules

When we eliminate a complex, shared state and design around non-strict processing, we can leverage parallelism to improve performance. In this chapter, we'll look at the multiprocessing and multithreading techniques that are available to us. Python library packages become particularly helpful when applied to algorithms that permit lazy evaluation.

The central idea here is to distribute a functional program across several threads within a process or across several processes. If we've created a sensible functional design, we can avoid complex interactions among application components; we have functions that accept argument values and produce results. This is an ideal structure for a process or a thread.

In this chapter, we'll focus on several topics:

• The general idea of functional programming and concurrency.
• What concurrency really means when we consider cores, CPUs, and OS-level parallelism. It's important to note that concurrency won't magically...