Python – Multithreading

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Source: https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/time/sleep

Multithreading in Python

Before talking about sleep() in multithreaded programs, let’s talk about processes and threads.

A computer program is a collection of instructions. A process is the execution of those instructions.

A thread is a subset of the process. A process can have one or more threads.

Example: Python multithreading

All the programs above in this article are single-threaded programs. Here’s an example of a multithreaded Python program.

The above program has two threads t1 and t2. These threads are run using t1.start() and t2.start() statements.

Note that, t1 and t2 run concurrently and you might get different output.

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time.sleep() in multithreaded programs

The sleep() function suspends execution of the current thread for a given number of seconds.

In case of single-threaded programs, sleep() suspends execution of the thread and process. However, the function suspends a thread rather than the whole process in multithreaded programs.

Example: sleep() in a multithreaded program

The above program has two threads. We have used time.sleep(0.5) and time.sleep(0.75) to suspend execution of these two threads for 0.5 seconds and 0.7 seconds respectively.