In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads.First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization – breaking a number to its prime factors. Here is a very naive and un-optimized function that take...

As the horsepower packed into mobile devices gets ever greater, more full-featured forms of multitasking are possible. The market leaders have very different ways of going about things, and there are numerous misconceptions about what is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t all the fault of the user, though. In the interest of ease of use, sometimes the multitasking metaphor is overly simplified on both Android and iOS. iOS: It’s more complicated than it looksEver since iOS 4, Apple’s platform has had a limited form of multitasking accessed with a double tap of the home ...