Sessions at PyCon US 2012 about Scaling with video

Thursday 8th March 2012

• Optimize Performance and Scalability with Parallelism and Concurrency

  by Robert Hancock

  From how the operating system handles your requests through design principles on how to use concurrency and parallelism to optimize your program's performance and scalability. We will cover processes, threads, generators, coroutines, non-blocking IO, and the gevent library.

  How processes, threads, coroutines, and non-blocking IO work from the operating system through code implementation and design principles to optimize Python programs. The difference between parallelism and concurrency and when to use each.

  The premise is that to make an informed decision you need to know what is happening under the hood. Once you understand the low level functionality, you can make the correct decision in the design phase.

  The emphasis is on practical application to solve real world problems.

  Outline

  • How the operating system handles traps and interrupts
  • Scheduling
  • Processes
  • Threads
  • The GIL
  • Generators
  • What is a coroutine?
  • What is a Python coroutine?
  • Blocking/Non-blocking I/O.
  • Parallelism versus Concurrency
  • How do these work with CPython, Pypy, and Stackless
  • Greenlets and libevent (gevent)
  • Design principles
  • Example networked application
  • Performance results
  • What are other the other options?
  • Concurrency
  • Parallel Programming
  • Performance
  • Python
  • Scaling

  At 9:00am to 12:20pm, Thursday 8th March

  In F2, Santa Clara Convention Center

  Coverage slide deck video

Friday 9th March 2012

• Scalability at YouTube

  by Shannon -jj Behrens and Mike Solomon

  This talk covers scalability at YouTube. It's given by one of the original engineers at YouTube, Mike Solomon. It's a rare glimpse into the heart of YouTube which is one of the largest websites in the world, and one of the few extremely large websites to be written in Python.
  Abstract

  Every day, people watch an average of 3 billion videos on YouTube. Every minute, people upload an average of 48 hours of video to YouTube. YouTube operates at a scale that few other websites will ever see, and it's written mostly in Python.

  Mike Solomon is one of the original engineers at YouTube. In this informal, high-level talk, he'll give an overview of the lessons he's learned as he's brought YouTube to scale. He'll also point out ways in which his philosophy on scaling, testing, and writing Python fly in the face of accepted wisdom. Last of all, we'll also be giving a very short introduction to YouTube APIs and how you can integrate your application with YouTube.

  • Python
  • Scaling
  • YouTube

  At 11:30am to 12:10pm, Friday 9th March

  In E1, Santa Clara Convention Center

  Coverage video write-up