Threading's job is to enable applications to be responsive. Suppose you have a database connection and you need to respond to user input. Without threading, if the database connection is busy the application will not be able to respond to the user. By splitting off the database connection into a separate thread you can make the application more responsive. Also because both threads are in the same process, they can access the same data structures - good performance, plus a flexible software design.

注意，由于GIL，应用程序实际上并没有同时做两件事，但我们所做的是将数据库上的资源锁放在一个单独的线程中，这样CPU时间就可以在它和用户交互之间切换。CPU时间在线程之间分配。

Multiprocessing is for times when you really do want more than one thing to be done at any given time. Suppose your application needs to connect to 6 databases and perform a complex matrix transformation on each dataset. Putting each job in a separate thread might help a little because when one connection is idle another one could get some CPU time, but the processing would not be done in parallel because the GIL means that you're only ever using the resources of one CPU. By putting each job in a Multiprocessing process, each can run on it's own CPU and run at full efficiency.

关键的优势是隔离。进程崩溃不会导致其他进程崩溃，而线程崩溃可能会对其他线程造成严重破坏。

线程模块使用线程，多处理模块使用进程。不同之处在于线程在相同的内存空间中运行，而进程有单独的内存。这使得在多进程之间共享对象变得有点困难。由于线程使用相同的内存，必须采取预防措施，否则两个线程将同时写入同一内存。这就是全局解释器锁的作用。

生成进程比生成线程要慢一些。

Other answers have focused more on the multithreading vs multiprocessing aspect, but in python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) has to be taken into account. When more number (say k) of threads are created, generally they will not increase the performance by k times, as it will still be running as a single threaded application. GIL is a global lock which locks everything out and allows only single thread execution utilizing only a single core. The performance does increase in places where C extensions like numpy, Network, I/O are being used, where a lot of background work is done and GIL is released. So when threading is used, there is only a single operating system level thread while python creates pseudo-threads which are completely managed by threading itself but are essentially running as a single process. Preemption takes place between these pseudo threads. If the CPU runs at maximum capacity, you may want to switch to multiprocessing. Now in case of self-contained instances of execution, you can instead opt for pool. But in case of overlapping data, where you may want processes communicating you should use multiprocessing.Process.

另一件没有提到的事情是，它取决于你使用的是什么操作系统。在Windows中，进程是昂贵的，所以线程在Windows中会更好，但在unix中，进程比它们的Windows变体更快，所以在unix中使用进程要安全得多，而且生成速度快。

线程共享相同的内存空间，以确保两个线程不共享相同的内存位置，因此必须采取特殊的预防措施。CPython解释器使用一种称为GIL的机制来处理这个问题，或全局解释器锁

什么是GIL(我只是想澄清GIL，上面重复了一次)?

在CPython中，全局解释器锁(GIL)是一个互斥锁，用于保护对Python对象的访问，防止多个线程同时执行Python字节码。这个锁是必要的，主要是因为CPython的内存管理不是线程安全的。

对于主要问题，我们可以使用用例，如何进行比较?

1-线程的用例:在GUI程序中，线程可以用来使应用程序具有响应性。例如，在文本编辑程序中，一个线程可以负责记录用户输入，另一个线程可以负责显示文本，第三个线程可以进行拼写检查，等等。在这里，程序必须等待用户交互。这是最大的瓶颈。线程的另一个用例是受IO限制或受网络限制的程序，例如web scraper。

2- Multiprocessing的用例:当程序是CPU密集型的，并且不需要做任何IO或用户交互的情况下，Multiprocessing优于线程。

要了解更多详细信息，请访问此链接和链接，或者您需要深入了解线程访问这里，多处理访问这里