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Multiprocessing

Category: Parallelism · Status: stub · Lessons: chapter 08, Processes (planned)

One line: Using several processes instead of several threads — for isolation, or to get parallelism in a runtime whose threads share one global lock.

Also called: process pool, ProcessPoolExecutor.

How it connects

flowchart LR
  n_ipc["Inter-process communication"]
  n_multiprocessing["Multiprocessing"]
  n_process["Process"]
  n_multiprocessing -->|uses| n_ipc
  n_multiprocessing -->|uses| n_process
  classDef center stroke-width:3px
  class n_multiprocessing center
  classDef outside stroke-dasharray: 4 3
  class n_ipc,n_process outside

In each language
Python multiprocessing ↗ and ProcessPoolExecutor ↗; in 3.14 the default start method on POSIX changed from fork to forkserver, while macOS and Windows use spawn

Where to read more