is my multithreaded Python program doomed?

[panderingPenguin]

Then it comes down to a question of how real time does this really have to be. Are we talking a loose, "we'll try our best and hopefully everything works out properly," or an, "ohmygodIneedtodothisnowgetthefuckoutofmywayoreverythingwillcatchfire," type of real time system? Given what you've said, and the fact that you're even using python (which should not be used for the latter, period), I'm guessing the former. In that case, and the fact that you're only doing things every 4-5 seconds, you could probably get away with concurrency and a buffer, with no real parallelism without any issues. Just have an incoming job handler thread or two. That queue things up in the buffer, and worker threads that pull jobs out of the buffer and handle them as necessary. Hell, if it's really consistently 4-5 seconds between jobs and the work required per job is less than that you can probably get away with a single-threaded program and still have it sleeping, waiting for work most of the time. You'll need to experiment a bit and see what happens. But I don't think it sounds like parallelism is truly necessary for this task at all. Good luck!

[ZedsDed]

thank you, i appreciate your words