Named semaphores in Python?

Question

I have a script in python which uses a resource which can not be used by more than a certain amount of concurrent scripts running.

Classically, this would be solved

Answer 1

You can emulate them by using the filesystem instead of a kernel path (named semaphores are implemented this way on some platforms anyhow). You'll have to implement sem_[open|wait|post|unlink] yourself, but it ought to be relatively trivial to do so. Your synchronization overhead might be significant (depending on how often you have to fiddle with the semaphore in your app), so you might want to initialize a ramdisk when you launch your process in which to store named semaphores.

Alternatively if you're not comfortable rolling your own, you could probably wrap boost::interprocess::named_semaphore (docs here) in a simple extension module.