Get all items from thread Queue

Question

I have one thread that writes results into a Queue.

In another thread (GUI), I periodically (in the IDLE event) check if there are results in the queue, like this:

Answer 1

I'd be very surprised if the get_nowait() call caused the pause by not returning if the list was empty.

Could it be that you're posting a large number of (maybe big?) items between checks which means the receiving thread has a large amount of data to pull out of the Queue? You could try limiting the number you retrieve in one batch:

def queue_get_all(q):
    items = []
    maxItemsToRetrieve = 10
    for numOfItemsRetrieved in range(0, maxItemsToRetrieve):
        try:
            if numOfItemsRetrieved == maxItemsToRetrieve:
                break
            items.append(q.get_nowait())
        except Empty, e:
            break
    return items

This would limit the receiving thread to pulling up to 10 items at a time.