Recently I built a GUI application using PySide, and do some background calculation using multiprocessing. Using Python interpreter to run this application works smoothly. But if I freeze it to Windows executable file (exe) and run it, guess what, I got two main windows showing up!
After searching a while, I found following code should be added
multiprocessing.freeze_support()
It should be placed right after:
if __name__ == '__main__':
The freeze_support() is mainly used to pass initialization data from parent process to newly created process using pipe, including modules, process name, current working directory, etc. In Unix-based system this function is not needed, because fork will do these things for us (multiprocessing.Process will call os.fork() in start method on Linux)
the low-level implementation is in Lib/multiprocessing/forking.py and a wrapper in Lib/multiprocessing/__init__.py.
By reading the source code, we can see Python will detect –multiprocessing-fork in command line arguments to determine whether current process is child process or not. And the last command line argument is the pipe file handle. The data in main process is serialized using pickle, then pass to child process using pipe.
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