Python in a Nutshell

Event-Driven Socket Programs

Socket programs, particularly servers, must often be ready to perform many tasks at once. Example 19-1 accepts a connection request, then serves a single client until that client has finished—other connection requests must wait. This is not acceptable for servers in production use. Clients cannot wait too long: the server must be able to service multiple clients at once.

One approach that lets your program perform several tasks at once is threading, covered in Chapter 14. Module SocketServer optionally supports threading, as covered earlier in this chapter. An alternative to threading that can offer better performance and scalability is event-driven (also known as asynchronous) programming.

An event-driven program sits in an event loop, where it waits for events. In networking, typical events are “a client requests connection,” “data arrived on a socket,” and “a socket is available for writing.” The program responds to each event by executing a small slice of work to service that event, then goes back to the event loop to wait for the next event. The Python library supports event-driven network programming with low-level select module and higher-level asyncore and asynchat modules. Even more complete support for event-driven programming is in the Twisted package (available at http://www.twistedmatrix.com), particularly in subpackage twisted.internet.

The select Module

The select module exposes a cross-platform low-level function that lets you implement ...