What I have last known is that GIL languages work well in multicore scenarios as long as all N tasks have I/O calls that serve as yielding points for the interpreter, and they do not use preemptive scheduling like the BEAM VM (Erlang, Elixir, LFE, Alpaca) do.
As far as Python goes, yes. Multicore implies multiple processes, which means that each process will have it's own Python interpreter, each with it's own GIL.
If you were to use multithreading instead, you would generally have a problem if you were doing non-I/O work.
Then I think we have a misunderstanding of terms. To me "multicore" == "single process, many threads". Apologies for the confusion.
It seems that now we are both on the same page. Single process & many threads are problematic for GIL languages and that's why I gave up using Ruby for scrapers. GIL languages can work very well for the URL downloading part though.
Am I mistaken?