PrintYou have probably noticed if you have a relatively modern PC (anything from the last several years) that when you open Windows Task Manager (from the bottom of the list when you press CTRL-ALT-DEL) and you click the Performance tab and right click on the CPU graph and choose Change Graph to -> Logical Processors you have a number of processors (or cores) within your PC. These are actually “logical processors“ within your main processor but they function as though they were individual processors – and we’ll just refer to them as processors here for simplicity.
Now because we have multiple processors, we can run multiple tasks in parallel at the same time instead of one at a time. There are two ways that we can run tasks at the same time – multithreaded and multiprocessing. We’ll look at the differences in each in the following but it’s important to know that arcpy doesn’t support multithreading but it does support multiprocessing. In addition, there is a third form of parallelisation called distributed computing, which involves distributing the task over multiple computers, that we will also briefly talk about.