how do I listen on a socket without sucking up all the CPU time?

[Mike 'Cat' Perkonigg]

donn at oz.net (Donn Cave) wrote in <8reb7f$gk6$0 at 216.39.151.169>:

>Quoth blablu at gmx.net (Mike 'Cat' Perkonigg):
>| There comes another question in mind: Can I somehow tell a thread that 
there 
>| is nothing to do so another thread can consume more time?
>| I heard the active thread changes if there are 10 byteOps are done. Does 
that 
>| mean I have just to implement a "while 1: pass" loop to have this thread 
>| consume less time?
>
>As another followup has already mentioned, any external function call
>that could stall for any time at all will when properly implemented,
>release the global interpreter lock.  As soon as you block on a
>semaphore or I/O device or anything of that sort, you hit one of
>these functions and another thread can go.
>
>This is really a design opportunity, a good time to start thinking
>about how a central dispatching facility in your program could
>provide something along these lines.
>
>     Donn Cave, donn at oz.net
>

I have some threads which are just looking if a queue is filled. So the 
main loop of these threads consist of:

while runFlag:
    	if inQueue.empty() == 0:
    	    	doSomething...

I could do:

while runFlag:
    	inData = inQueue.get(1)
    	doSomething...

but if I do that I can't check runFlag most of the time.

My main understanding problem is now, what I have to do if I want to check 
this queue every 10 seconds without blocking other threads.
Can I use time.sleep(10) as a timer or will that block the thread 
switching?

Regards,
Mike