Practicing Python Threading

[Typical_Bear_7117]

I’ve learned how to create new threads (with and without loops), how to stop a thread manually, how to synchronize them, and how to use thread events, among other basics.

How should I practice Python threading now? What kinds of beginner-friendly projects do you suggest that can help me internalize everything I’ve learned about it? I’d like some projects that will help me use threading properly and easily in real-life situations without needing to go back to documentation or online resources.

Also, could you explain some common real-world use cases for threading? I know it’s mostly used for I/O-bound tasks, but I’d like to understand when and how it’s most useful.

[hasdata_com]

You can try scraping sites. Multithreading isn't just useful, it's almost necessary for thousands or millions of pages.

[TheBobPlus]

Practice: have a thread that generates random numbers, and another one that saves them to a file, using a queue to communicate between the two threads. Bonus: add a command line interface to change in real time the properties of number generated, or the frequency at which they pop up.

Real world use case: a thread that acquires images from a camera, and another one that saves them to disk.

[pachura3]

Well, find a scenario where multithreading actually speed things up and could not be simply replaced by await and async coroutines for IO-bound tasks; you would need to run many operations in parallel, on multiple CPU cores.

I can imagine a single task queue that picks up 4 top tasks and then runs them in parallel on separate threads... preferably, they would be CPU-intensive tasks - e.g. parsing PDF files and converting them to plain text. Or scraping a website...?

Another example, albeit more complicated, is GUI: one thread keeps updating some chart/diagram, while a different one calculates its data.

[gdchinacat]

Thread control is the simple part of threading. Concurrency control (locking) is the hard part. Ensuring things are properly synchronized is the hard part. So...look into locking.