[zenspider]

I'm much more familiar with threads in ruby. It would actually be a real boon to this project imo.

I don't have as much experience with python threads as I do ruby. I've toyed with the internals of python and perl as well and know perl to be a wasteland and python to be rather elegantly clean. So I would expect python's threads to be better implemented. Poking at it, it does appear to be so.

[jmtulloss]

Doesn't ruby only have green threads?

[michaelneale]

Yes - unless its jruby then they are non green (forget the term for it at this time of the morning).

[zenspider]

yes... and they're great. Esp for situations like the OP was describing. Fire off a ton of incredibly lightweight threads and they'll quietly sit waiting for IO... perfect.