Threading pool similar to the multiprocessing Pool?

I just found out that there actually is a thread-based Pool interface in the multiprocessing module, however it is hidden somewhat and not properly documented.

It can be imported via

from multiprocessing.pool import ThreadPool

It is implemented using a dummy Process class wrapping a python thread. This thread-based Process class can be found in multiprocessing.dummy which is mentioned briefly in the docs. This dummy module supposedly provides the whole multiprocessing interface based on threads.

In Python 3 you can use concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor, i.e.:

executor = ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=10)
a = executor.submit(my_function)

See the docs for more info and examples.

Yes, and it seems to have (more or less) the same API.

import multiprocessing

def worker(lnk):
    ....    
def start_process():
    .....
....

if(PROCESS):
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=POOL_SIZE, initializer=start_process)
else:
    pool = multiprocessing.pool.ThreadPool(processes=POOL_SIZE, 
                                           initializer=start_process)

pool.map(worker, inputs)
....

For something very simple and lightweight (slightly modified from here):

from Queue import Queue
from threading import Thread


class Worker(Thread):
    """Thread executing tasks from a given tasks queue"""
    def __init__(self, tasks):
        Thread.__init__(self)
        self.tasks = tasks
        self.daemon = True
        self.start()

    def run(self):
        while True:
            func, args, kargs = self.tasks.get()
            try:
                func(*args, **kargs)
            except Exception, e:
                print e
            finally:
                self.tasks.task_done()


class ThreadPool:
    """Pool of threads consuming tasks from a queue"""
    def __init__(self, num_threads):
        self.tasks = Queue(num_threads)
        for _ in range(num_threads):
            Worker(self.tasks)

    def add_task(self, func, *args, **kargs):
        """Add a task to the queue"""
        self.tasks.put((func, args, kargs))

    def wait_completion(self):
        """Wait for completion of all the tasks in the queue"""
        self.tasks.join()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from random import randrange
    from time import sleep

    delays = [randrange(1, 10) for i in range(100)]

    def wait_delay(d):
        print 'sleeping for (%d)sec' % d
        sleep(d)

    pool = ThreadPool(20)

    for i, d in enumerate(delays):
        pool.add_task(wait_delay, d)

    pool.wait_completion()

To support callbacks on task completion you can just add the callback to the task tuple.