How does ThreadPoolExecutor().map differ from ThreadPoolExecutor().submit?

Question

I was just very confused by some code that I wrote. I was surprised to discover that:

with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as executor:
             


        

Answer 1

Below is an example of submit vs. map. They both accept the jobs immediately (submitted|mapped - start). They take the same time to complete, 11 seconds (last result time - start). However, submit gives results as soon as any thread in the ThreadPoolExecutor maxThreads=2 completes. map gives results in the order they are submitted.

import time
import concurrent.futures

def worker(i):
    time.sleep(i)
    return i,time.time()

e = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(2)
arrIn = range(1,7)[::-1]
print arrIn

f = []
print 'start submit',time.time()
for i in arrIn:
    f.append(e.submit(worker,i))
print 'submitted',time.time()
for r in concurrent.futures.as_completed(f):
    print r.result(),time.time()
print

f = []
print 'start map',time.time()
f = e.map(worker,arrIn)
print 'mapped',time.time()
for r in f:
    print r,time.time()    

Output:

[6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1]
start submit 1543473934.47
submitted 1543473934.47
(5, 1543473939.473743) 1543473939.47
(6, 1543473940.471591) 1543473940.47
(3, 1543473943.473639) 1543473943.47
(4, 1543473943.474192) 1543473943.47
(1, 1543473944.474617) 1543473944.47
(2, 1543473945.477609) 1543473945.48

start map 1543473945.48
mapped 1543473945.48
(6, 1543473951.483908) 1543473951.48
(5, 1543473950.484109) 1543473951.48
(4, 1543473954.48858) 1543473954.49
(3, 1543473954.488384) 1543473954.49
(2, 1543473956.493789) 1543473956.49
(1, 1543473955.493888) 1543473956.49