Fastprocess

A fast subprocess library

Note

This library is no longer maintained.

Modern versions of subprocess are very close to as fast as this library, so just use that :)

Usage

Spawning a process with fastprocess is very easy

In [1]: from fastprocess import FastProcess

In [2]: pid = FastProcess(['echo', 'hello', 'world'])

hello world
In [3]: pid.wait()
Out[3]: 0

You can redirect io using the stdin, stdout, and stderr options

In [4]: null = open('/dev/null', 'w')

In [5]: pid = FastProcess(['yes'], stdout=null)

In [6]: pid.terminate()

FastProcess methods

terminate():
Sends SIGTERM to the process

kill(sig):
Sends signal 'sig' to the process

wait():
Waits for the process to exit then returns the exit code

Performance

Here are the results of running ./benchmark/bench

---------------------------------------------------
10000 spawns with fork and exec...

real	0m2.157s
user	0m0.048s
sys	0m2.104s
---------------------------------------------------
10000 spawns with fastprocess...

real	0m2.598s
user	0m1.225s
sys	0m0.356s
---------------------------------------------------
10000 spawns with subprocess...

real	0m12.211s
user	0m7.832s
sys	0m9.072s
---------------------------------------------------