Question

I have a simple app that listens to a socket connection. Whenever certain chunks of data come in a callback handler is called with that data. In that callback I want to send my data to another process or thread as it could take a long time to deal with. I was originally running the code in the callback function, but it blocks!!

What’s the proper way to spin off a new task?

Answer 1

threading is the threading library usually used for resource-based multithreading. The multiprocessing library is another library, but designed more for running intensive parallel computing tasks; threading is generally the recommended library in your case.

Example

import threading, time
def my_threaded_func(arg, arg2):
    print "Running thread! Args:", (arg, arg2)
    time.sleep(10)
    print "Done!"

thread = threading.Thread(target=my_threaded_func, args=("I'ma", "thread"))
thread.start()
print "Spun off thread"