wxPython and threads

[Iain King]

On Jul 18, 3:41 am, Benjamin <musiccomposit... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm writing a search engine in Python with wxPython as the GUI. I have
> the actual searching preformed on a different thread from Gui thread.
> It sends it's results through a Queue to the results ListCtrl which
> adds a new item. This works fine or small searches, but when the
> results number in the hundreds, the GUI is frozen for the duration of
> the search. I suspect that so many search results are coming in that
> the GUI thread is too busy updating lists to respond to events. I've
> tried buffer the results so there's 20 results before they're sent to
> the GUI thread and buffer them so the results are sent every .1
> seconds. Nothing helps. Any advice would be great.

I do something similar - populating a bunch of comboboxes from data
takes a long time so I run the generator for the comboboxes in another
thread (and let the user use some textboxes in the mean time).  A
rough edit toward what you might be doing:

import thread

class Processor(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.lock = thread.allocate_lock()
        self.alive = False
        self.keepalive = False

    def start(self):
        if not self.alive:
            self.alive = True
            self.keepalive = True
            thread.start_new_thread(self.Process, (None,))

    def stop(self):
        self.keepalive = False

    def process(self, dummy=None):
        self.alive = False


class SearchProcessor(Processor):
    def __init__(self, entries, lookfor, report):
        Processor.__init__(self)
        self.entries = entries
        self.lookfor = lookfor
        self.report = report

    def process(self, dummy=None):
        for entry in self.entries:
            if lookfor in entry:
                self.report(entry)
            if not self.keepalive:
                break
        self.report(None)
        self.alive = False


results = []

def storeResult(result):
    if result != None:
        results.append(result)
    else:
        notifySomeMethod(results)

sp = SearchProcessor(someListOfData, someTextToSearchFor, storeResult)
sp.start()

when the search is done it will call notifySomeMethod with the
results.  Meanwhile you could, for example, bind sp.stop() to a cancel
button to stop the thread, or add a counter to the storeResult
function and set a status bar to the total found, or whatever else you
want to do.

Iain