[Python-Dev] Add an optional timeout to lock operations (original) (raw)

David Bolen db3l.net at gmail.com
Wed Nov 18 22:28:39 CET 2009

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> writes:

I've submitted a patch (*) to add an optional timeout to locking operations (Lock.acquire() etc.). Since it's a pretty basic functionality, I would like to know if there was any good reason for not doing it.

I always assumed it was because as a least-common-denominator set of functionality, some platforms didn't have the necessary support.

Providing the discussion on this ends up with the an implementation being accepted, I'd absolutely love to see this then leveraged by threading.Condition.wait() rather rather than the current poll-with-timed-sleep approach.

The overhead (CPU, but most notably latency) of that approach (which also directly impacts Queues) has historically been my top reason in various applications on Windows to have to implement my own Queue or Condition structures using native Windows calls.

-- David

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