Using the python multiprocessing module for IO with pygame on Mac OS 10.7

Question

I use pygame for running experiments in cognitive science, and often I have heavy I/O demands so I like to fork off these tasks to separate processes (when using a multi-core ma

Answer 1

Have you tried using threads instead of processes? I've had issues before using the python multiprocessing module in OS X. http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html

Answer 2

Maybe you should initialize the pygame (which initialize SDL-> OpenGL) in each forked (child) process like in sample:

import multiprocessing

def f():
  import pygame
  pygame.init()

  while True:
    pygame.event.pump()

if __module__ == "__main__"
  p = multiprocessing.Process(target=f)
  p.start()

  import pygame
  pygame.init()

  while True:
    pygame.event.pump()

Answer 3

Try this link:

http://www.slideshare.net/dabeaz/an-introduction-to-python-concurrency#btnPrevious

It may help. The problem is that you are creating a process that never stops. This should be declared as a daemon:

p = multiprocessing.Process(target=f)
p.daemon = True
p.start()

Not sure if this will solve the problem, I'm just learning about the multiprocessing module as I'm posting this.