In Python for *nix, does time.sleep()
block the thread or the process?
It blocks the thread. If you look in Modules/timemodule.c in the Python source, you'll see that in the call to floatsleep()
, the substantive part of the sleep operation is wrapped in a Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS and Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS block, allowing other threads to continue to execute while the current one sleeps. You can also test this with a simple python program:
import time
from threading import Thread
class worker(Thread):
def run(self):
for x in xrange(0,11):
print x
time.sleep(1)
class waiter(Thread):
def run(self):
for x in xrange(100,103):
print x
time.sleep(5)
def run():
worker().start()
waiter().start()
Which will print:
>>> thread_test.run()
0
100
>>> 1
2
3
4
5
101
6
7
8
9
10
102