There are numerous ways to multiprocess in python. Pools give a very easy way.
Note: If you do not catch keyboard interrups as shown in the code then you will have to wait until all workers have finished even if you send Ctrl+C to the parent process. There are other methods such as map (blocks until each result is received and orders sequentially), apply and apply_async where you can provide a callback function that actually determines what must be done with the result. If the task items are not iterable then you must use apply or apply_async and handle the input in the callback.
from multiprocessing import Pool
from functools import partial
import time
import sys
def doWork(i, x):
"""
Does the actual work.
"""
print i
time.sleep(2)
return (x * i)
pass
def multi():
"""
Does the actual multiprocessing.
"""
# Create the pool.
pool = Pool()
# We must convert the doWork to a function of one argument.
# This argument will be filled in by an iterator.
partialWorker = partial(doWork, x=5)
tasks = range(100)
p = pool.map_async(partialWorker, tasks)
try:
results = p.get(0xFFFF)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print "Received Ctrl-c"
sys.exit(1)
pool.close()
pool.join()
pass
if __name__ == "__main__":
multi()
