What is GIL?

VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago

Python has a construct called the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). The GIL makes sure that only one of your ‘threads’ can execute at any one time. A thread acquires the GIL, does a little work, then passes the GIL onto the next thread. This happens very quickly so to the human eye it may seem like your threads are executing in parallel, but they are really just taking turns using the same CPU core. All this GIL passing adds overhead to execution.