Producer/consumer Queue "trick"

[Evan Simpson]

WEBoggle needs a new game board every three minutes.  Boards take an 
unpredictable (much less than 3min, but non-trivial) amount of time to 
generate. The system is driven by web requests, and I don't want the 
request that happens to trigger the need for the new board to have to 
pay the time cost of generating it.

I set up a producer thread that does nothing but generate boards and put 
them into a length-two Queue (blocking).  At the rate that boards are 
pulled from the Queue, it's almost always full, but my poor consumer 
thread was still being blocked for "a long time" each time it fetched a 
board.

At this point I realized that q.get() on a full Queue immediately wakes 
up the producer, which has been blocked waiting to add a board to the 
Queue.  It sets about generating the next board, and the consumer 
doesn't get to run again until the producer blocks again or is preempted.

The solution was simple: have the producer time.sleep(0.001) when 
q.put(board) returns.

Cheers,

Evan @ 4-am