Fairly new 'programmer' here, trying to understand how Python interacts with Windows when multiple unrelated scripts are run simultaneously, for example from Task Manager or just starting them manually from IDLE. The scripts just make http calls and write files to disk, and environment is 3.6.
Is the interpreter able to draw resources from the OS (processor/memory/disk) independently such that the time to complete each script is more or less the same as it would be if it were the only script running (assuming the scripts cumulatively get nowhere near using up all the CPU or memory)? If so, what are the limitations (number of scripts, etc.).
Pardon mistakes in terminology. Note the quotes on 'programmer'.
how Python interacts with Windows
Python is an executable, a program. When a program is executed a new process is created.
python myscript.py starts a new python.exe process where the first argument is your script.
when multiple unrelated scripts are run simultaneously
They are multiple processes.
Is the interpreter able to draw resources from the OS (processor/memory/disk) independently?
Yes. Each process may access the OS API however it wishes, to the extend that it is possible.
What are the limitations?
Most likely RAM. The same limitations as any other process might encounter.
These are difficult questions to answer, in part because they depend on:
Your operating system: Your OS gets to schedule and run tasks when it wants, which the Python programmer often does not have control over.
What your scripts are actually doing: If your scripts are all trying to write to the same drive, their execution may be halted more often than if no device was being written to. Or the script might run even faster if only one script writes to the drive, as the CPU can let one script calculate when another script writes. (It's hard to tell without benchmark testing.)
How many CPUs you're using: The number of Central Processing Units can improve parallel processing of programs -- but perhaps not. If your programs are constantly reading and writing from the same disk, more CPUs may not be a benefit.
Your Python version: (I'm just adding this for completeness.)
Ultimately, the only way you're going to get any real information on this is if you do your own benchmarking -- and even then, you should remember that those figures you find are only applicable to your current setup. That is, if you go to another computer elsewhere, you may find you get different results.
If you aren't familiar with Python's timeit module, I recommend you look into it. (I'm pretty sure it's a standard module, so you should already have it.) It'll help you do benchmark testing and let you get some definitive answers for your platform.
By asking questions like yours, you may soon hear about Python's GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). It has to do with Python threads, and some people think it's a blessing, and some think it's a curse. Either way, this page:
https://realpython.com/python-gil/
has a good high-level explanation of it when it can work well and when it might not.
I read somewhere you could run python without an OS. How would I do this? Would I need to compile it? Can I run it raw? And if I did need to compile it, what tool would I use and what format would I compile it to?
As far as I know there's not really any way to do this easily but I could be wrong. There are "portable" versions of python but these are operating system dependent. I think what you're referencing is some guys at PyCon managed to run python from the GRUB Bootloader. Your best bet would be installing some minimalist Linux distribution, with essentially only Python and some core packages required to run. The problem is that there's a lot of types of hardware out there, all with their own drivers and assembly language. Python can work as a low level language when you need it to but it seems like configuration would be a nightmare. I haven't looked into it super thoroughly but it seems difficult and impractical. Having an OS above python gives you access to the package managers IDEs and compilier options that make python worth using.
yea that's one of the options, pretty much all the "light" distros will be similar, if you want more to try out try here. Not sure why you're worried about speed though, if you're having speed issues it's far more likely to be the IDE you're using or your code bogging down the computer, not any sort of compiler issues.
I created a module in Python which provides about a dozen functionalities. While it will be mostly used from within Python, there is a good fraction of legacy users which will be calling it from Perl.
What is the best way to make a plug in to this module? My thoughts are:
Provide the functionalities as command line utilities and make system calls
Create some sort of server and handle RPC calls (say, via JSON RPC)
Any advise?
One other choice is to inline Python directly in your Perl script, using Inline::Python.
This may be simpler than other solutions, and only requires one additional module.
In the short run the easiest solution is to use Inline::Python. Closely followed by calling a command-line script.
In the long run, using a server to provide RPC functionality or simply calling a command-line script will give you the most future proof solution.
Why?
Becuase that way you aren't tied to Perl or Python as the language used to build the systems that consume the services provided by your library. Either method creates a clear, language independent interface that you can use with whatever development environment you adopt.
Depending on your needs any of the presented options may be the "best choice". Depending on how your needs evolve over time, a different choice may be revealed as "best".
My approach to this would be to ask a couple of questions:
How often do you change development tools. You've switched to Python from Perl. Did you start with Tcl and go to Perl? Are you going to switch to the exciting new language X in 1, 5 or 10 years? If you change tools 'often' (whatever that means) emphasize cross tool compatibility.
How fast is fast enough? Is the start up time for command line solutions ok? Does Inline::Python slow things down too much (you are still initializing a Python interpreter, it's just embedded in your Perl interpreter)?
Based on the answers to these questions, I would do the simplest thing that is likely to work.
My guess is that means in order:
Inline::Python
Command line scripts
Build an RPC server
Provide the functionalities as command line utilities and make system calls
Works really nicely. This is the way programs like Python (and Perl) are meant to use used.
i'm working with pydev + jython.great ide , but quite slow when i try to run a jython program.
this is probably something due to libraries load time.
What can i do to speed it up ?
Thanks ,
yaniv
Jython startup time is slow ... there's a lot to bootup!
Everytime you run a Jython script from scratch, it will incur the same Jython startup time cost.
Hence, the reason Jython, Java, and Python are not great for CGI invocations. Hence, the reason for mod_python in Apache.
The key is to start-up Jython once and reuse it. But this is not always possible especially during development because your modules are always changing and Jython does not recognize these changes automatically.
Jython needs a way to know which modules have changed for automatic reloads. This is not built into Jython and you'll have to rely on some other third party library to help with this. The concept is to remove from 'sys.modules' the modules which have changed. A simple solution is to just clear all the modules from sys.modules - which will cause all modules to be reloaded. This is obviously, not the most efficient solution.
Another tip is to only import modules that your module needs at the time that it 'really' needs them. If you import every module at the top of your modules, that will increase your module import cost. So, refactor imports to within methods/functions where they are needed and where it 'makes sense'. Of course, if your method/function is computation heavy and is used frequently, it does not make sence to import modules within that method/function.
Hopefully, that helps you out!
If you have a machine with more than one processor you could try starting eclipse/pydev with the options -vmargs -XX:+UseParallelGC You could also try different JVMs to see if any of them give better performance.
I've got some experience with Bash, which I don't mind, but now that I'm doing a lot of Windows development I'm needing to do basic stuff/write basic scripts using
the Windows command-line language. For some reason said language really irritates me, so I was considering learning Python and using that instead.
Is Python suitable for such things? Moving files around, creating scripts to do things like unzipping a backup and restoring a SQL database, etc.
Python is well suited for these tasks, and I would guess much easier to develop in and debug than Windows batch files.
The question is, I think, how easy and painless it is to ensure that all the computers that you have to run these scripts on, have Python installed.
Summary
Windows: no need to think, use Python.
Unix: quick or run-it-once scripts are for Bash, serious and/or long life time scripts are for Python.
The big talk
In a Windows environment, Python is definitely the best choice since cmd is crappy and PowerShell has not really settled yet. What's more Python can run on several platform so it's a better investment. Finally, Python has a huge set of library so you will almost never hit the "god-I-can't-do-that" wall. This is not true for cmd and PowerShell.
In a Linux environment, this is a bit different. A lot of one liners are shorter, faster, more efficient and often more readable in pure Bash. But if you know your quick and dirty script is going to stay around for a while or will need to be improved, go for Python since it's far easier to maintain and extend and you will be able to do most of the task you can do with GNU tools with the standard library. And if you can't, you can still call the command-line from a Python script.
And of course you can call Python from the shell using -c option:
python -c "for line in open('/etc/fstab') : print line"
Some more literature about Python used for system administration tasks:
The IBM lab point of view.
A nice example to compare bash and python to script report.
The basics.
The must-have book.
Sure, python is a pretty good choice for those tasks (I'm sure many will recommend PowerShell instead).
Here is a fine introduction from that point of view:
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/07/python-for-bash-scripters-a-well-kept-secret/
EDIT: About gnud's concern: http://www.portablepython.com/
Are you aware of PowerShell?
Anything is a good replacement for the Batch file system in windows. Perl, Python, Powershell are all good choices.
#BKB definitely has a valid concern. Here's a couple links you'll want to check if you run into any issues that can't be solved with the standard library:
Pywin32 is a package for working with low-level win32 APIs (advanced file system modifications, COM interfaces, etc.)
Tim Golden's Python page: he maintains a WMI wrapper package that builds off of Pywin32, but be sure to also check out his "Win32 How Do I" page for details on how to accomplish typical Windows tasks in Python.
Python is certainly well suited to that. If you're going down that road, you might also want to investigate SCons which is a build system itself built with Python. The cool thing is the build scripts are actually full-blown Python scripts themselves, so you can do anything in the build script that you could otherwise do in Python. It makes make look pretty anemic in comparison.
Upon rereading your question, I should note that SCons is more suited to building software projects than to writing system maintenance scripts. But I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Python to you in any case.
As a follow up, after some experimentation the thing I've found Python most useful for is any situation involving text manipulation (yourStringHere.replace(), regexes for more complex stuff) or testing some basic concept really quickly, which it is excellent for.
For stuff like SQL DB restore scripts I find I still usually just resort to batch files, as it's usually either something short enough that it actually takes more Python code to make the appropriate system calls or I can reuse snippets of code from other people reducing the writing time to just enough to tweak existing code to fit my needs.
As an addendum I would highly recommend IPython as a great interactive shell complete with tab completion and easy docstring access.
I've done a decent amount of scripting in both Linux/Unix and Windows environments, in Python, Perl, batch files, Bash, etc. My advice is that if it's possible, install Cygwin and use Bash (it sounds from your description like installing a scripting language or env isn't a problem?). You'll be more comfortable with that since the transition is minimal.
If that's not an option, then here's my take. Batch files are very kludgy and limited, but make a lot of sense for simple tasks like 'copy some files' or 'restart this service'. Python will be cleaner, easier to maintain, and much more powerful. However, the downside is that either you end up calling external applications from Python with subprocess, popen or similar. Otherwise, you end up writing a bunch more code to do things that are comparatively simple in batch files, like copying a folder full of files. A lot of this depends on what your scripts are doing. Text/string processing is going to be much cleaner in Python, for example.
Lastly, it's probably not an attractive alternative, but you might also consider VBScript as an alternative. I don't enjoy working with it as a language personally, but if portability is any kind of concern then it wins out by virtue of being available out of the box in any copy of Windows. Because of this I've found myself writing scripts that were unwieldy as batch files in VBScript instead, since I can't usually depend on Python or Perl or Bash being available on Windows.
Python, along with Pywin32, would be fine for Windows automation. However, VBScript or JScript used with the Windows Scripting Host works just as well, and requires nothing additional to install.
I've been using a lot of Windows Script Files lately. More powerful than batch scripts, and since it uses Windows scripting, there's nothing to install.
As much as I love python, I don't think it a good choice to replace basic windows batch scripts.
I can't see see someone having to import modules like sys, os or getopt to do basic things you can do with shell like call a program, check environment variable or an argument.
Also, in my experience, goto is much easier to understand to most sysadmins than a function call.