How to Thread in Python

In computer science, a thread is a context for program execution. A multithreaded application has multiple threads that execute on their own, unless the programmer forces explicit synchronization between given threads. A thread is lightweight and efficient in its use of computer resources; unlike a process, no separate memory address space needs to be created for a thread. In particular, you can write multithreaded Python applications by using primitives defined as part of the standard library.

Instructions

1. Include the following lines at the beginning of your Python code:

   import thread

   import threading

2. Define a separate function to encapsulate the code that the new thread will run, as in the following sample code:

   import time

   def myThreadFunction(timeToWait):

   print 'Thread about to wait '+str(timeToWait)+' seconds."

   time.sleep(timeToWait)

   print 'Thread finished waiting '+str(timeToWait)+' seconds."

   The sample code will wait for "timeToWait" seconds, announcing the beginning and end of that time interval.

3. Create the thread as in the following sample code:

   thread.start_new_thread(myThreadFunction, (10))

   The first argument to the library function "thread.start_new_thread()" is the name of the function encapsulating the thread's code; the second argument is a tuple with whatever parameters that function needs. For the example, the tuple has a single integer element -- the number of seconds we want the thread to wait before exiting.

References

• Python.org: Brief Tour of the Standard Library -- Part II