Close Listening Socket In Python Thread

I have a problem trying to learn about sockets for network communication. I have made a simple thread that listens for connections and creates processes for connecting clients, my

Solution 1:

One way to get the thread to close seems to be to make a connection to the socket, thus continuing the thread to completion.

def stop(self):
    self.running = False
    socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, 
                  socket.SOCK_STREAM).connect( (self.hostname, self.port))
    self.socket.close()

This works, but it still feels like it might not be optimal...

Solution 2:

In most cases you will open a new thread or process once a connection is accepted. To close the connection, break the while loop. Garbage collection will remove the thread or process but join will ensure none get left behind.

Persistent sockets close when the user closes them or they timeout. Non-persistent, like static webpages will close after they've sent the information.

Here's a good example of a persistent socket server in Python. It uses multiprocessing which means it can run across multiple cores for CPU-bound tasks. More commonly known as multithreading.

import socket
import multiprocessing

def run():
    host = '000.000.000.000'
    port = 1212
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    sock.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
    sock.bind(('', port))
    sock.listen(3)
    while True:
        p = multiprocessing.Process(target=worker, args=sock.accept()).start()
def worker(conn, addr):
    while True:
        if data == '':
            #remote connection closed
            break
         if len(dataList) > 2:
            # do stuff
            print 'This code is untested'

run()

Solution 3:

A dirty solution which allows to exit your program is to use os._exit(0).

def stop(self):
    self.socket.close()
    os._exit(0)

note that sys.exit doesn't work/blocks as it tries to exit cleanly/release resources. But os._exit is the most low level way and it works, when nothing else does.

The operating system itself will release the resources (on any modern system) like when doing exit in a C program.

Solution 4:

The best way to do this is to have a single listening thread that has nothing to do with your connection threads and give it a reasonable length timeout. On timeout, check if this thread should shutdown and if not, loop again and go back to listening.

    def tcp_listen_handle(self, port=23, connects=5, timeout=2):
        """This is running in its own thread."""
        sock = socket.socket()
        sock.settimeout(timeout)
        sock.bind(('', port))
        sock.listen(connects)  # We accept more than one connection.
        while self.keep_running_the_listening_thread():
            connection = None
            addr = None
            try:
                connection, addr = sock.accept()
                print("Socket Connected: %s" % str(addr))
                # makes a thread deals with that stuff. We only do listening.
                self.handle_tcp_connection_in_another_thread(connection, addr)
            except socket.timeout:
                pass
            except OSError:
                # Some other error.
                print("Socket was killed: %s" % str(addr))
                if connection is not None:
                    connection.close()
        sock.close()

The only thing this does is listen, timeout, checks if it should die during the timeout, and goes back to listening. The general rule of thumb is that threads should check whether they should die and try to do that themselves as fast as they can. And if you don't want to take the 2 second hit for timeout wait before the thread unblocks and checks. You can connect to it yourself.

Solution 5:

Partially tested solution

1. Put self.socket.settimeout(0.1) right before while
2. Put conn.settimeout(None) right after accept