Right now I'm running 50 PHP (in CLI mode) individual workers (processes) per machine that are waiting to receive their workload (job). For example, the job of resizing an image. In workload they receive the image (binary data) and the desired size. The worker does it's work and returns the resized image back. Then it waits for more jobs (it loops in a smart way). I'm presuming that I have the same executable, libraries and classes loaded and instantiated 50 times. Am I correct? Because this does not sound very effective.
What I'd like to have now is one process that handles all this work and being able to use all available CPU cores while having everything loaded only once (to be more efficient). I presume a new thread would be started for each job and after it finishes, the thread would stop. More jobs would be accepted if there are less than 50 threads doing the work. If all 50 threads are busy, no additional jobs are accepted.
I am using a lot of libraries (for Memcached, Redis, MogileFS, ...) to have access to all the various components that the system uses and Python is pretty much the only language apart from PHP that has support for all of them.
Can Python do what I want and will it be faster and more efficient that the current PHP solution?
Most probably - yes. But don't assume you have to do multithreading. Have a look at the multiprocessing module. It already has an implementation of a Pool included, which is what you could use. And it basically solves the GIL problem (multithreading can run only 1 "standard python code" at any time - that's a very simplified explanation).
It will still fork a process per job, but in a different way than starting it all over again. All the initialisations done- and libraries loaded before entering the worker process will be inherited in a copy-on-write way. You won't do more initialisations than necessary and you will not waste memory for the same libarary/class if you didn't actually make it different from the pre-pool state.
So yes - looking only at this part, python will be wasting less resources and will use a "nicer" worker-pool model. Whether it will really be faster / less CPU-abusing, is hard to tell without testing, or at least looking at the code. Try it yourself.
Added: If you're worried about memory usage, python may also help you a bit, since it has a "proper" garbage collector, while in php GC is a not a priority and not that good (and for a good reason too).
From PHP workers to Python threads