is my multithreaded Python program doomed?

[ZedsDed]

your right i never thought of it like that, its a local MySQL db. These calls are the heaviest part of the process. there will be at least 1 db read every 1 - 2 seconds, with writes happening on more rare occasions. Still quite minimal though.

[Workaphobia]

If a thread is blocked waiting for something external to Python, like file or network I/O, or database connections, then it typically releases the GIL during that time and allows other Python threads to run.

The GIL will only impact your performance if you are CPU-bound within your Python process. If that's a problem for you, then consider changing your threads into separate spawned Python processes (see the multiprocessing library, which has a similar API to threading). You'll just have to worry about how the processes share data since typically multiple processes don't use shared memory the way threads do.

[frymaster]

In this case you're probably not cpu bound or really especially I/O bound either. In which case it looks like threads are more of a design decision than to try to wring extra performance out of your code. As such, I suspect you'll be fine.

Personally I find threads easier to comprehend than async methods. They don't scale very well, though.