Monday 11:30 a.m.–noon
A tale of concurrency through creativity in Python: a deep dive into how gevent works.
Kavya Joshi
- Audience level:
- Intermediate
- Category:
- Python Libraries
Description
gevent is an open source Python library for asynchronous I/O. It provides a powerful construct to build concurrent applications; think threads, except lightweight and cooperatively scheduled. We will delve into how gevent is architected from its building blocks — sophisticated coroutines, an event loop, and a dash of creativity to neatly integrate them.
Abstract
Asynchronous frameworks like gevent make it possible to write highly concurrent and performant applications in CPython. Unlike traditional concurrency constructs like threads and processes which tend to be heavyweight, gevent's "Greenlets" are inexpensive to spawn, making them ideal for applications like servers that need to handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections.
So how does gevent provide an execution unit that is both ideal for concurrency and lightweight?
At its heart, gevent runs on sophisticated coroutines (greenlets) and an event loop (the libev event loop). It neatly integrates greenlets into the libev event loop and builds additional mechanisms to schedule execution switches as well.
In this talk, we will dive into how gevent works. We will look into how greenlets and the libev event loop work, and what gevent uses them for. We will then delve into how gevent integrates them and its additional mechanisms to provide a concurrency model that, like threads, is transparent to the application.
PyCon 2016 in Portland, OR is a production of the 