urllib.urlopen blocking all threads for seconds when no connection or exception?

[Aahz]

In article <3df89a91$0$3028$9b622d9e at news.freenet.de>,
Robert  <k.robert at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>Running the script below on windows (XP), when the computer has no 
>connection to the site, urlopen blocks ALL other threads for seconds 
>unpleasantly, as  shown in the output below. When the connection is 
>there, everything seems to run smooth and seamless, regardless how 
>time-consuming the urlopen or read is.
>
>is there a solution to this problem?

Which version of Python is this?  (Probably doesn't matter, but I'm
asking anyway.)  On many OSes, some calls are not thread-safe
(gethostbyname() is a common one on Unix), and threads will block until
that call returns.  You're probably hitting something like that; if so,
there's not much Python can do.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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