Question

I am making a RPM file cache server. A PC on the network accesses the cache server. If the file is present on the server, it is served. If not, it is downloaded from the internet before being served.

I wrote this with BaseHTTPServer with urllib to fetch the files. Now with small files, there is little delay between downloading the file and serving it.

...
store_file.write(download_buffer.read())
store_file.close()
...
f=open(file_path,'r')
self.wfile.write(f.read())
...

But some files may take minutes to download. So the client is kept waiting, while server finishes the file. This may cause client to time-out. How do we serve the file as it is being downloaded to prevent time-outs by the client?

Answer 1

A read-write loop.

x= download_buffer.read(1024)
while x:
    self.wfile.write(x)
    x= download_buffer.read(1024)