Question

I have a class that is only ever accessed externally through static methods. Those static methods then create an object of the class to use within the method, then they return and the object is presumably destroyed. The class is a getter/setter for a couple config files and now I need to place thread locks on the access to the config files.

Since I have several different static methods that all need read/write access to the config files that all create objects in the scope of the method, I was thinking of having my lock acquires done inside of the object constructor, and then releasing in the destructor.

My coworker expressed concern that it seems like that could potentially leave the class locked forever if something happened. And he also mentioned something about how the destructor in python was called in regards to the garbage collector, but we’re both relatively new to python so that’s an unknown.

Is this a reasonable solution or should I just lock/unlock in each of the methods themselves?

Class A():
    rateLock = threading.RLock()
    chargeLock = threading.RLock()

    @staticmethod
    def doZStuff():
        a = A()
        a.doStuff('Z')

    @staticmethod
    def doYStuff():
        a = A()
        a.doStuff('Y')

    @synchronized(lock)
    def doStuff(self, type):
        if type == 'Z':
            otherstuff()
        elif type == 'B':
            evenmorestuff()

Is it even possible to get it to work that way with the decorator on doStuff() instead of doZStuff()

Update

Thanks for the answers everyone. The problem I’m facing is mostly due to the fact that it doesn’t really make sense to access my module asynchronously, but this is just part of an API. And the team accessing our stuff through the API was complaining about concurrency issues. So I don’t need the perfect solution, I’m just trying to make it so they can’t crash our side or get garbage data back

Answer 1

You are right with the garbage collection, so it is not a good idea.
Look into decorators, for writing synchronized functions.

Example: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/465057-basic-synchronization-decorator/

edit
I’m still not 100% sure what you have in mind, so my suggestion may be wrong:

class A():
    lockZ = threading.RLock()
    lockY = threading.RLock()

    @staticmethod
    @synchroized(lockZ)
    def doZStuff():
        a = A()
        a.doStuff('Z')

    @staticmethod
    @synchroized(lockY)
    def doYStuff():
        a = A()
        a.doStuff('Y')

    def doStuff(self, type):
        if type == 'Z':
            otherstuff()
        elif type == 'B':
            evenmorestuff()