How do I limit the number of active threads in python?

Question

Am new to python and making some headway with threading - am doing some music file conversion and want to be able to utilize the multiple cores on my machine (o

Answer 1

If you want to limit the number of parallel threads, use a semaphore:

threadLimiter = threading.BoundedSemaphore(maximumNumberOfThreads)

class EncodeThread(threading.Thread):

    def run(self):
        threadLimiter.acquire()
        try:
            <your code here>
        finally:
            threadLimiter.release()

Start all threads at once. All but maximumNumberOfThreads will wait in threadLimiter.acquire() and a waiting thread will only continue once another thread goes through threadLimiter.release().