In a multi-threaded program that does lots of regular
expression searching, some of them on very long strings
with complex regex we've noticed that everything stops
when a regular expression is searching.

One of the issue is that the re engine does not release
the interpreter lock while it is running. All the
other threads are therefore blocked for the entire time
it takes to do the regular expression search.

See the thread in python-dev about it:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-November/058316.html