I have a Python app that needs to fetch data from 2-3 different sources (SQL Server, MongoDB etc..) and it can be done in parallel, as I simply need all of the data together later, and each request does not rely on the others.
I couldn't figure which is better for this case - threads, processes or async await?
I read that differences are mostly in CPU usage and I/O. But what if I simply wish to make multiple requests simultaneously (and not sequentially)? Of course, no CPU usage here at all.
I'd suggest you have a look at python's builtin Threading module...
... a quote from the doc:
CPython implementation detail: In CPython, due to the Global Interpreter Lock, only one thread can execute Python code at once (even though certain performance-oriented libraries might overcome this limitation). If you want your application to make better use of the computational resources of multi-core machines, you are advised to use multiprocessing or concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor. However, threading is still an appropriate model if you want to run multiple I/O-bound tasks simultaneously.
in short... multithreading has the problem of GIL (e.g. global interpreter lock) but as you can read here...
...the GIL is always released when doing I/O.
