If a software project supports a version of Python that multiprocessing has been backported to, is there any reason to use threading.Lock over multiprocessing.Lock? Would a multiprocessing lock not be thread safe as well?
For that matter, is there a reason to use any synchronization primitives from threading that are also in multiprocessing?
I would expect the multi-threading synchronization primitives to be quite faster as they can use shared memory area easily. But I suppose you will have to perform speed test to be sure of it. Also, you might have side-effects that are quite unwanted (and unspecified in the doc).
For example, a process-wise lock could very well block all threads of the process. And if it doesn't, releasing a lock might not wake up the threads of the process.
In short, if you want your code to work for sure, you should use the thread-synchronization primitives if you are using threads and the process-synchronization primitives if you are using processes. Otherwise, it might work on your platform only, or even just with your specific version of Python.
multiprocessing and threading packages have slightly different aims, though both are concurrency related. threading coordinates threads within one process, while multiprocessing provide thread-like interface for coordinating multiple processes.
If your application doesn't spawn new processes which require data synchronization, multiprocessing is a bit more heavy weight, and threading package should be better suited.
The threading module's synchronization primitive are lighter and faster than multiprocessing, due to the lack of dealing with shared semaphores, etc. If you are using threads; use threading's locks. Processes should use multiprocessing's locks.