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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T11:04:36+00:00

I have some long-term processes and such that must occur at given button-presses or

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I have some long-term processes and such that must occur at given button-presses or other events in a Jython GUI I am creating.

In such situations, it seems the best option is to make a separate thread to run the called method/function in when the event happens.

What is the best way to do this? import Threading and have a class that I initialize and run when actionPerformed? Use invokelater? It seems there are a lot of ways to go about this, but would work best in the Jython-Swing environment and be the ‘fastest’?

start = JButton( "Analyze", actionPerformed = self.do_analysis )

def do_analysis(self):
    ...
    Large Time Consuming Task
    ...
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m not 100% sure that jython has the same problem, but in C Python, you would run into a problem with the GIL or Global Interpreter Lock. This will mean that when your background thread is running, the GUI thread cannot start (even if it is queued to run on another core). You click a button and nothing happens 🙁

    To get round this, I would split the long running process into short steps that can be run on an event, and queue up the event to start the next step as the current step ends. Then the GUI will be able to run between steps if it needs to. The shorter you make the steps, the more responsive the GUI will be – 50ms to 100ms should be OK.

    This approach has the nice side effect that you don’t need to worry about threads, locking, message queueing or anything. You can try and add these to a GUI but the GUI events and the threads can fight, leading to some very strange and hard to debug errors.

    As for the “fastest”, this is probably the lowest overhead for shorter background tasks. If you create a new process to run the background task (very heavy overhead in Windows) then it will run faster becasue it has its own core, but the start/stop overhead is high.

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