Real Python: Python Thread Safety: Using a Lock and Other Techniques

Python threading allows you to run parts of your code concurrently, making the code more efficient, but it can also introduce issues such as race conditions if not handled properly. To solve these issues, you can use tools like locks, semaphores, events, conditions, and barriers. This tutorial aims to teach you how to identify safety issues and prevent them by using synchronization primitives in Python's threading module to make your code thread-safe. The tutorial covers topics such as what thread safety is, what race conditions are and how to avoid them, how to identify thread safety issues in your code, and what different synchronization primitives exist in the threading module. To get the most out of this tutorial, you need to have basic experience working with multithreaded code using Python's threading module and ThreadPoolExecutor. Python's threading is a concurrency framework that allows you to spin up multiple threads that run concurrently, each executing pieces of code. This improves the efficiency and responsiveness of your application. The Python interpreter switches between threads, handing the control of execution over to each thread. A context switch occurs when the Python interpreter pauses the execution state of the current thread and passes control to another thread. The context switch interval is the time interval at which the Python interpreter checks if it should switch to another thread. You can check the context switch interval of your Python interpreter by using the sys.getswitchinterval() function. By running a script with multiple threads, you can observe the creation of threads and how they execute code concurrently. The output of the script shows the interleaved execution of multiple threads, demonstrating that multiple threads are running at the same time, taking turns to execute their part of the code. The tutorial also provides a sample code that you can download to learn about thread safety techniques in Python. Additionally, there is an interactive quiz that you can take to test your knowledge of Python thread safety.