You may already be aware of this but, just a heads Python also its issues w/ threading. These are mainly due the the fact that there is no native mysql interface and the python interpreter is not truly threaded. Once it drops into a c function python loses all ability to kill a thread. This is partially addressed in python 2.6 with multiprocess which is a module with almost the same api as threading but uses subprocess to run the threads. To me this seems like a very hacked approach to fix the problem since subprocess forks a new process for each thread. This is fine for a small number of threads but, if you are trying to load test or run nagios checks for hundreds of mysql instances you could easily kernel panic the box with that many forks. Until python has a native mysql interface Jython may be a better option.

Just a few random thoughts on the subject. I hope it saves you guys some of the pain we have experienced.

That being said there are a number of other good reasons to switch. The biggest is that it is far harder to write unmaintainable code in python. Before all the perl guy get mad at me for this I am not saying that you can’t write maintainable perl, you can, but, you don’t have to. For our environment where a large number of people, many of them being sys admins rather than coders, contribute to the code base this is a very good thing.

–Koa