Concurrency

Threading

Xapian does not provide explicit support for multi-threading, though it can be used in a multi-threaded program if you are aware of the details described below.

Xapian doesn’t maintain any global state, so you can safely use Xapian in a multi-threaded program provided you don’t share objects between threads. In practice this restriction is often not a problem - each thread can create its own xapian.Database object, and everything will work fine.

If you really want to access the same Xapian object from multiple threads, then you need to ensure that it won’t ever be accessed concurrently (if you don’t ensure this bad things are likely to happen - for example crashes or even data corruption). One way to prevent concurrent access is to require that a thread gets an exclusive lock on a mutex while the access is made.

Xapian doesn’t include thread locking code to avoid imposing an overhead when it isn’t needed. And in practice the caller can often lock over several operations, which wouldn’t work if the locking code was in Xapian itself.

Be aware that some Xapian objects will keep internal references to others - for example, if you call xapian.Database.get_document(), the resulting xapian.Document object will keep a reference to the xapian.Database object, and so you can’t safely use the xapian.Database object in one thread at the same time as using the xapian.Document object in another.