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Python Threads vs Processes: concurrent.futures, the GIL and When Each Actually Speeds Things Up

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Self-Hosting & Infra intermediate 6 min read $0.01 Updated 2026-10-20

Measured on a 12-core machine with Python 3.10: CPU-bound work took 0.77 s serial, 1.43 s with 4 threads and 0.25 s with 4 processes, while 8 sleeping I/O tasks took 1.6 s serial and 0.2 s with 8 threads. Plus exception handling.

Threads speed up waiting on the network but slow down CPU-bound loops. Measure both with ThreadPoolExecutor and ProcessPoolExecutor, see the results, and avoid silent exception loss.

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#python#concurrency#threading#multiprocessing#gil

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