Question

I’m attempting to build a very simple wxPython GUI that monitors and displays external data. There is a button that turns the monitoring on/off. When monitoring is turned on, the GUI updates a couple of wx StaticLabels with real-time data. When monitoring is turned off, the GUI idles.

The way I tried to build it was with a fairly simple Python Thread layout. When the ‘Start Monitoring’ button is clicked, the program spawns a thread that updates the labels with real-time information. When the ‘Stop Monitoring’ button is clicked, thread.join() is called, and it should stop.

The start function works and the real-time data updating works great, but when I click ‘Stop’, the whole program freezes. I’m running this on Windows 7 64-bit, so I get the usual “This Program has Stopped Responding” Windows dialog.

Here is the relevant code:

class MonGUI(wx.Panel):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent)
        ...
        ... other code for the GUI here ...
        ...
        # Create the thread that will update the VFO information
        self.monThread = Thread(None, target=self.monThreadWork)
        self.monThread.daemon = True
        self.runThread = False

    def monThreadWork(self):
        while self.runThread:
            ...
            ... Update the StaticLabels with info
            ... (This part working)
            ...

    # Turn monitoring on/off when the button is pressed.
    def OnClick(self, event):
        if self.isMonitoring:
            self.button.SetLabel("Start Monitoring")
            self.isMonitoring = False
            self.runThread = False
            self.monThread.join()
        else:
            self.button.SetLabel("Stop Monitoring")
            self.isMonitoring = True

            # Start the monitor thread!
            self.runThread = True
            self.monThread.start()

I’m sure there is a better way to do this, but I’m fairly new to GUI programming and Python threads, and this was the first thing I came up with.

So, why does clicking the button to stop the thread make the whole thing freeze up?

Answer 1

It’s likely hanging on join([timeout]), which blocks the calling thread until the thread whose join() method is called terminates – either normally or through an unhandled exception – or until the optional timeout occurs.

Do you have some inner loop in your thread, or a blocking call that waits for some source of data that may never come? When I wrote a basic serial program that grabbed COM port data, it would sometimes hang because a read function in my thread would block until it got something.

I would sprinkle in a few debugging print statements to see whats happening.

Edit:

I’d also use a threading.Event() instead of a Boolean flag, e.g.:

# in the init code...
self.runThread = threading.Event()

# when starting thread...
self.runThread.set()
self.monThread.start()

# in the thread...
while self.runThread.isSet():
    pass # do stuff

# killing the thread...
self.runThread.clear()
self.monThread.join()

This shouldn’t make it work differently, but it’s a slightly safer way to do it.