The Right Way for a long time was to run multiple processes. If you absolutely needed threads, then the Other Way That Is Less Correct involved launching thread

The Right Way for a long time was to run multiple processes. If you absolutely needed threads, then the Other Way That Is Less Correct involved launching threads written in C from a C extension The Python community seems to be warming to the importance of threads. There are several efforts breaking their swords against the GIL nowadays (Unladen Swallow being the most prominent), and Antoine Pitrou wrote a new GIL to help improve contention [1]. With any luck, by the end of the Python Feature Freeze, there will be some significant headway towards efficient handling of threads within Python, but I'm not holding my breath yet ;) [1] http://www.dabeaz.com/python/NewGIL.pdf http://www.dabeaz.com/python/NewGIL.pdf