Programming in Python/

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Mechanisms for Sharing Resources

Mechanisms for Sharing Resources

Learn about three mechanisms for sharing resources between threads in Python.

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Python’s threading module provides three mechanisms for sharing resources between threads in different situations:

  • For synchronized access to shared resources, use a lock Lock.
  • For nested access to shared resources, use the reentrant lock RLock.
  • For permitting a limited number of accesses to a resource, use a semaphore.

Lock

Locks are used to synchronize access to a shared resource. We first create a Lock object. When we need to access the resource, we call acquire(), then use the resource, and once done, we call release(), as shown below:

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import threading 
lck = threading.Lock()
lck.acquire( )
# use the resource
print('Lock acquired')
lck.release( )
print('Lock released')

Note: A lock can be in two states—locked or unlocked. ...