[ZODB-Dev] ZEO client hangs when combined with other asyncore code

[Tony Meyer]

[Tim Peters]
> asyncore gives me a headache.

I think this is true for any value of "me" <0.5 wink>.

[Tim, later]
>> BTW, something that might help get more clues:  ZEO does a
>> nasty thing to asyncore.  In ZEO's 
>> ThreadedAsync/LoopCallback.py, it reaches into Python's 
>> asyncore module and _replaces_ asyncore.loop with its own 
>> loop function. That shouldn't change the functionality of 
>> asyncore, but it means that if you, e.g., put print 
>> statements or debugger breakpoints in Python's asyncore loop, 
>> they'll never trigger.  If you're working at that level, you 
>> need to put them in LoopCallback.py's functions instead.

Argh.  This explains a lot.  I couldn't understand why print statements in
asyncore.loop didn't print, unless I renamed loop and called the renamed
function (which would then have done bad things to ZEO, no doubt).  Nasty
indeed :)

> If the flow is like this:
>
>   asyncore mainloop invokes POP3 proxy code
>       POP3 proxy code makes a synchronous ZEO call
> then I figure the app may well hang then:  the thread running the
> asyncore mainloop is still running a POP3 proxy callback, 
> waiting for a response that can never happen until the asyncore
> mainloop gets control back (in order to send & receive ZEO messages).

This was definitely the problem.  The easiest solution (partly because some
of this work is already done <wink>), IMO, is to separate out the ZEO and
asyncore-based proxy into separate asyncore maps and have two asyncore
mainloop threads, one for each map.  This follows Tim's comment about ZEO
expecting the asyncore loop to be in a separate thread, too.

Anyway, this appears to have fixed the problem.  Many thanks for the clues -
you might not have understood why it was hanging, but your comments were
enough to get it fixed anyway :)

=Tony.Meyer