Comment 8 for bug 692635

@Severin: It's been slow going for me so far, but I read through http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ and am starting to get a feel for Python. I can now run lottanzb under the eclipse/pydev debugger. I'm not yet happy with what I can do in eclipse but I'm making progress.

I was able to see threads spawning off about 1 per second as you described. That was with an empty download queue. Tomorrow I'll do some exploring with what happens with an active downhload queue and when items are being added/deleted from the queue.

My gut feeling is that 1 spawn per second while ugly is no big deal. At least that would be the case at the OS level for Windows or Linux. However, I imagine it is possible though hopefully unlikely that the overhead of spawning Python threads is much higher. I don't yet know what sort of profiling or performance benchmarking tools are readily available but it should be fairly easy to come up with a way to measure the performance cost of spawning/killing threads.

But the more urgent issue is to get an understanding of what the threads are doing and whether they are violating the synchronization requirements of the code and data that they access. It sounds like you are already looking. Please post anything you find.