What is Python's "built-in method acquire"? How can I speed it up?

I'm writing a Python program with a lot of file access. It's running surprisingly slowly, so I used cProfile to find out what was taking the time.

It seems there's a lot of time spent in what Python is reporting as "{built-in method acquire}". I have no idea what this method is. What is it, and how can I speed up my program?

From stackoverflow

• Without seeing your code, it is hard to guess. But to guess I would say that it is the threading.Lock.acquire method. Part of your code is trying to get a threading lock, and it is waiting until it has got it.

  There may be simple ways of fixing it by

  • restructuring your file access,
  • not locking,
  • using blocking=False,
  • or even not using threads at all.

  But again, without seeing your code, it is hard to guess.

  Chris B. : It's _not_ the threading.Lock.acquire method. It turns out to be the threading.Condition.acquire method. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to tell them apart in the profile output.

  Ali A : The two things represent similar situations.

• Using threads for IO is a bad idea. Threading won't make your program wait faster. You can achieve better results by using asynchronous I/O and an event loop; Post more information about your program, and why you are using threads.

  Chris B. : I'm using threads because I've got a slow network read operation going on, and I need to do some processing on the data after it's loaded. With the current design, I can load two datasets, generate a merge key on each, and merge and save them. Maybe an event loop's better for that, but I doubt it.

  David Locke : -1, threading multiple I/O operations can be beneficial in python because each thread will release the GIL while it's waiting for the OS to process the request.

  nosklo : @David: And how exactly that is better than using asynchronous I/O?

• you want to look for cpu used, not for "total time used" from within that method--that might help. Sorry I don't use python but that's how it is for me in ruby :) -r