[Zope] xml-rpc question

[Kevin Carlson]

Hi all,

I need to run a python script called via xml-rpc that is kicked off by a 
cron job.  This script will be making several dozen, perhaps over 100, 
different http requests to external servers, some of which can be quite 
slow on the return.

I am curious to know if I am likely to receive a http timeout on this if 
the xml-rpc request takes a long time -- seems to me that that would 
happen.  Also, curious to know whether anyone has done something like 
this before and may know of a better way, perhaps using threads, or 
another mechanism that would let the xml-rpc call return (without a 
timeout) while the remainder of the work is being done.  I'd like to 
avoid changing the timeout value on Apache since I don't want to change 
this across the board, if possible.

Any ideas?  Any known recipes out there?

Thanks,

Kevin