python threading/fork?

Question

I'm making a python script that needs to do 3 things simultaneously. What is a good way to achieve this as do to what i've heard about the GIL i'm not so lean into using threads anymore.
2 of the things that the script needs to do will be heavily active, they will have lots of work to do and then i need to have the third thing reporting to the user over a socket when he asks (so it will be like a tiny server) about the status of the other 2 processes.
Now my question is what would be a good way to achieve this? I don't want to have three different script and also due to GIL using threads i think i won't get much performance and i'll make things worse.
Is there a fork() for python like in C so from my script so fork 2 processes that will do their job and from the main process to report to the user? And how can i communicate from the forked processes with the main process?

LE:: to be more precise 1thread should get email from a imap server and store them into a database, another thread should get messages from db that needs to be sent and then send them and the main thread should be a tiny http server that will just accept one url and will show the status of those two threads in json format. So are threads oK? will the work be done simultaneously or due to the gil there will be performance issues?

Answer 1

I think you could use the multiprocessing package that has an API similar to the threading package and will allow you to get a better performance with multiple cores on a single CPU.

To view the gain of performance using multiprocessing instead threading, check on this link about the average time comparison of the same program using multiprocessing x threading.

Answer 2

The GIL is really only something to care about if you want to do multiprocessing, that is spread the load over several cores/processors. If that is the case, and it kinda sounds like it from your description, use multiprocessing.

If you just need to do three things "simultaneously" in that way that you need to wait in the background for things to happen, then threads are just fine. That's what threads are for in the first place. 8-I)