“select” on multiple Python multiprocessing Queues?

Question

What\'s the best way to wait (without spinning) until something is available in either one of two (multiprocessing) Queues, where both reside on the same system?

Answer 1

New version of above code...

Not sure how well the select on a multiprocessing queue works on windows. As select on windows listens for sockets and not file handles, I suspect there could be problems.

My answer is to make a thread to listen to each queue in a blocking fashion, and to put the results all into a single queue listened to by the main thread, essentially multiplexing the individual queues into a single one.

My code for doing this is:

"""
Allow multiple queues to be waited upon.

An EndOfQueueMarker marks a queue as
    "all data sent on this queue".
When this marker has been accessed on
all input threads, this marker is returned
by the multi_queue.

"""
import queue
import threading

class EndOfQueueMarker:
    def __str___(self):
        return "End of data marker"
    pass

class queue_reader(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self,inq,sharedq):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.inq = inq
        self.sharedq = sharedq
    def run(self):
        q_run = True
        while q_run:
            data = self.inq.get()
            result = (self.inq,data)
            self.sharedq.put(result)
            if data is EndOfQueueMarker:
                q_run = False

class multi_queue(queue.Queue):
    def __init__(self,list_of_queues):
        queue.Queue.__init__(self)
        self.qList = list_of_queues
        self.qrList = []
        for q in list_of_queues:
            qr = queue_reader(q,self)
            qr.start()
            self.qrList.append(qr)
    def get(self,blocking=True,timeout=None):
        res = []
        while len(res)==0:
            if len(self.qList)==0:
                res = (self,EndOfQueueMarker)
            else:
                res = queue.Queue.get(self,blocking,timeout)
                if res[1] is EndOfQueueMarker:
                    self.qList.remove(res[0])
                    res = []
        return res

    def join(self):
        for qr in self.qrList:
            qr.join()

def select(list_of_queues):
    outq = queue.Queue()
    for q in list_of_queues:
        qr = queue_reader(q,outq)
        qr.start()
    return outq.get()

The follow code is my test routine to show how it works:

import multiq
import queue

q1 = queue.Queue()
q2 = queue.Queue()

q3 = multiq.multi_queue([q1,q2])

q1.put(1)
q2.put(2)
q1.put(3)
q1.put(4)
q1.put(multiq.EndOfQueueMarker)
q2.put(multiq.EndOfQueueMarker)
res=0
have_data = True
while have_data:
    res = q3.get()[1]
    print ("returning result =",res)
    have_data = not(res==multiq.EndOfQueueMarker)