2024-11-13

[EN] LLM "Knows" about `getpid'

Picture credit: Michelet B via Wikipedia.

Beware of the spoiler after the asterisks below, if you want to think about the answer first.

A process that retrieves and handles a large volume of data from a database, while making millions of calls to `read' and `write', also calls `getpid' a few million times interspersed with the former: why?

The program is written in Python and runs on Linux.

Embarrassingly I couldn't figure that out (and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on that), so I asked LLM, to test it, too.
Its answer was quite satisfactory.

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Answer (shortened):
A program or library that does or is prepared to do multiprocessing may need the pids of its processes or threads in order to manage mutual exclusion.

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