nonblocking

Is there a way I can use python's socket.accept() in a non-blocking way that simply runs it and lets me just check if it got any new connections? I really don't want to use threading. Thanks. Nathan Ostgard You probably want something like select.select() (see documentation ). You supply select() with three lists of sockets: sockets you want to monitor for readability, writability, and error states. The server socket will be readable when a new client is waiting. The select() function will block until one of the socket states has changed. You can specify an optional fourth parameter, timeout ,

I searched the web on some technical details about blocking I/O and non blocking I/O and I found several people stating that non-blocking I/O would be faster than blocking I/O. For example in this document . If I use blocking I/O, then of course the thread that is currently blocked can't do anything else... Because it's blocked. But as soon as a thread starts being blocked, the OS can switch to another thread and not switch back until there is something to do for the blocked thread. So as long as there is another thread on the system that needs CPU and is not blocked, there should not be any

I have code for reading an url like this: from urllib2 import Request, urlopen req = Request(url) for key, val in headers.items(): req.add_header(key, val) res = urlopen(req, timeout = timeout) # This line blocks content = res.read() The timeout works for the urlopen() call. But then the code gets to the res.read() call where I want to read the response data and the timeout isn't applied there. So the read call may hang almost forever waiting for data from the server. The only solution I've found is to use a signal to interrupt the read() which is not suitable for me since I'm using threads.