Stuart Bishop writes:

I have a method that generates a large database report (around 4MB). It takes around 5 minutes to generate, but I can happily stream it to the client using RESPONSE.write().

What I have noticed, however, is that if the client drops the connection, my method just keeps processing oblivious wasting ram, cycles but most importantly a Zope thread. Is there a call I can make for my code to check if the connection is still valid, allowing it to die if nothing is listening to it? Difficult....

The connection shutdown in recognized in a ZServer thread. A series of producers is used to interface this thread with the Zope thread. You would need to enchance the producers with a method, say "abortProcessing" which modifies the producer's state such that when the Zope thread delivers data for the next time, an exception is raised, aborting the thread execution. Dieter