Stopping a Thread with Time Slicing

[Todd Whiteman]

Steve wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've been trying to come up with a good way to run a certain process
> at a timed interval (say every 5 mins) using the SLEEP command and a
> semaphore flag. The basic thread loop was always sitting in the sleep
> command and not able to be interrupted. When the time came to set the
> semaphore flag to false (stopping the thread), my program would have
> to wait up to the entire sleep time to break out of the loop.
> 
> I have finally found a very workable solution to break out of the
> sleep loop by using a time slicing loop to divide the overall sleep
> time into small pieces (slices) giving the loop more opportunities to
> be interrupted.

A better approach for this is to use a Python Event or Condition object:
http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html#id5

Example code:


import threading
my_stop_event = threading.Event()

       # Sleep Loop :
       #for current_loop in range(0, self.time_slice) :
       #  time.sleep(self.sleep_time / self.time_slice)

       event.wait(self.sleep_time)
       if not self.running:    # check the flag
         break                 # break out of the sleep loop

# From another thread, you can notify the above sleeping thread using:
my_stop_event.set()


Cheers,
Todd