[noonat]

> Indeed you can hardly do many things at once - not in a single pure Python process. One thread doing something takes the GIL and the other thread waits.

> You can however wait for many things at once just fine - for example, using the multiprocessing module (pool.map), or you could spawn your own thread pool to do the same.

This paragraph is a bit deceiving. The multiprocessing module does spawn subprocesses by default, so it can indeed be used to workaround a GIL issue and do many things at once. It's not the same as a thread pool (although the multiprocessing module does offer a compatible interface which uses threads).

[justinmk]

> spawn subprocesses by default, so it can indeed be used to workaround a GIL issue and do many things at once

But that defeats the purpose of the distinction, because when you wait on a web request, I/O, etc, a machine or peripheral is also doing something on the other end.