[Idle-dev] Bug in IDLE

[Jonathan Lee]

Here's a bug/"undocumented feature" I found in the IDLE program.  I didn't 
find anything about it mentioned in the documentation, so I thought I would 
inform you about it.  Sorry for bothering you if you already know about it. 
 I'm running IDLE 0.8 with Python 2.1 under Windows 2000 Professional.

I was running an example program that I pulled out of a message on a SIG 
list (full code included below) for the threading.py module and discovered 
that under IDLE the program never completed.  It seemed to get stuck in the 
following loop under the 'main' conditional:

	while threading.activeCount() > 1 :
		print ".",
		time.sleep(1)

At a command line prompt, the program took about 35 seconds to complete. 
 Under IDLE, I finally killed it after it still hadn't completed after ~20 
minutes.  Is there a different function that should be used as the loop 
condition, is the activeCount() function including the IDLE threads in its 
count, or is the execution speed under IDLE really that much slower for 
this type of code?

Sincerely,
Jonathan Lee
2jlee*arkansas_net
<Replace the * and _ with the appropriate characters to contact me.>

P.S.  Is there some place I could obtain example code for the various 
modules included in the more recent editions of Python.  The two modules 
I've needed so far that I didn't find any example code for were the 
"SocketServer" and the "threading" modules.  I found the demo programs from 
the python source code on SourceForge, but they only use the more primitive 
"socket" and "thread" modules.

##################################################################


import urllib, time
import threading

retrieveDoc = 1
numPings = 20
numThreads = 5

url = 'http://www.foo.com/'



class ping ( threading.Thread ) :
	def __init__ ( self, url, numPings, retrieveDoc=1 ) :
		self.url = url
		self.numPings = numPings
		self.retrieveDoc = retrieveDoc
		threading.Thread.__init__(self)

	def run ( self ) :
		StartTime = time.time()
		for i in range(self.numPings):
			page = urllib.urlopen ( self.url )
			if self.retrieveDoc:
				page.read()
			page.close()
		EndTime = time.time()
		self.TotalTime = EndTime - StartTime



if __name__ == '__main__' :
	threadList = []
	for i in range(numThreads) :
		thread = ping ( url, numPings, retrieveDoc )
		threadList.append ( thread )

	StartTime = time.time()
	for thread in threadList :
		thread.start()

	while threading.activeCount() > 1 :
		print ".",
		time.sleep(1)
	EndTime = time.time()
	TotalTime = EndTime - StartTime
	print

	TotalPings = 0
	ThreadTime = 0
	for thread in threadList :
		TotalPings = TotalPings + thread.numPings
		ThreadTime = ThreadTime + thread.TotalTime

	PingAvg = TotalPings / TotalTime
	ResponseAvg = ThreadTime / TotalPings

	print "Threads: ", numThreads
	print "Pings:", TotalPings
	print "Total time:", TotalTime
	print "Pings per second:", PingAvg
	print "Average response time (secs):", ResponseAvg