How to receive and answer to socket asynchronously with Python?

Question

I'm working on a really basic "image streaming" server as a school subject, and I've done most of the work but I'm still stuck on the separation between data and control related sockets:

My structure is : TCPServer (my server, used as control socket) contains a dataSocket (only used to send images and initialized within my TCPServer object, when I receive a certain query)

When I'm sending data (images) through my dataSocket, I still need to see if the client sent a PAUSE or STOP request, but if I use python's self.request.recv(1024) the server awaits a response instead of continuing to send data (which is quite logical).

What should I do to prevent this behavior ? Should I launch my recv(1024) on a separate thread and run it at each loop (and check if I get any relevant data in between two iterations) ?

I think you will have to post some code if you want an answer. Are you saying you have two separate sockets between a client and server? One socket you send/receive control messages (like pause/stop) and the other socket you send/receive data messages? You are getting your control socket by subclassing SocketServer.TCPServer and then creating the data socket within that class? In general if you handling multiple sockets you need either threads or to use something like select: docs.python.org/2/library/select.html — Neal
– Neal, Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 17:14
You got everything right. My class (subclass of TCPSocket) handles the control queries, and also contains another socket (called dataSocket) that handle the data part. Maybe I should give select() a try as I try to minimize the number of threads launched in my app. — halflings
– halflings, Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 17:53

rbp · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-30 17:40:35Z

1

Twisted should do the trick! It handles asynchronous sockets in Python

answered Nov 30, 2012 at 17:40

rbp

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3 Comments

halflings Over a year ago

Unfortunately I can't use external (high-level) librairies as the goal of this exercise is to learn to work with low-level networking.

rbp Over a year ago

but you're allowed to ask on stackexchange how to do your homework

halflings Over a year ago

Yes, as Stackexchange is here to understand how (cool) things work. (at least that's what I'm using it for :-)).

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