SocketServer, its offspring, and threads

[eliben]

On May 26, 7:30 pm, "Giampaolo Rodola'" <gne... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25 Mag, 17:40, eliben <eli... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hello,
>
> > I have a small wxPython application. Today I was trying to add some
> > RPC capability to it, so I implemented an instance of
> > SimpleXMLRPCServer that runs in a separate thread when invoked and
> > answers requests.
>
> > All went fine until I realized that I have to sometimes stop the
> > server - which is where I ran into a problem. Python threads can not
> > be killed after they've been started. They can be kindly requested to
> > end, but it's up to the thread itself to decide when it wants to
> > finish. At least this is my understanding. It probably makes sense,
> > because threads can hold resources which can't just be dropped
> > suddenly, and have to be cleaned in a proper manner. (Does this sound
> > like the truth ?)
>
> > Anyway, this creates a problem because SimpleXMLRPCServer likes to
> > block and never return. I dug deeper and found out that all offspring
> > of SocketServer can only handle requests in a blocking manner. Even if
> > you call handle_request( ) and not serve_forever(), it will block
> > until a request is received and handled. This means that a
> > SocketServer object running in a thread blocks the thread, and this
> > thread can not be stopped.
>
> > Is there any graceful solution to this problem ?
>
> > I suppose I can use sockets in non-blocking mode, or use select(), but
> > this will mean I will have to implement my server with raw sockets and
> > not a handy helper like SocketServer. For the XML-RPC server I want
> > this is a headache, as I will probably have to implement my own XML-
> > RPC server based on raw non-blocking sockets.
>
> > Thanks in advance for any ideas and suggestions
> > Eli
>
> A "shutdown" method has been added to SocketServer.
> Since it will be available in Python 2.6 and 3.0 you could look at the
> patch and include a modified version of SocketServer into your package
> and use it:http://bugs.python.org/issue1193577
>

This is what I was looking for, thanks.