Question

I have a design problem:

I have two threads, a heartbeat/control thread and a messagehandler thread.

Both are sharing the same socket, however the messageHandler thread only sends out messages and never receives. The heartbeat thread sends and receives (receives messages and reacts on heartbeats).

The problem is I’m not sure if this is safe. There is no mechanism, I myself, implemented to see if the socket is being used. So is sharing a socket over python automatically thread safe or not?

Also if it’s not, the reason I put them in a separate thread is because the heartbeat is more important than the message handling. This means that if it gets flooded with messages, it still needs to do a heartbeat. So if I have to implement a bolt, is there away I can prioritize if my heartbeat/control thread needs to send a heartbeat?

Answer 1

Unfortunately,The socket shared by multi-thread is not thread safe.Think about buffer two threads operate on with no lock.

The normal way to implement is with two socket,just like what ftp does.cmd socket and msg socket.

If you wanna implement this by one socket,you can put different type msgs into different queues,and with a third thread consumes the queue and send them through the only socket.

In this way,you can control heartbeat msg priory to data msg.