[Zope] xml-rpc question

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 12:03:54PM -0400, Kevin Carlson wrote:
> 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.

It can happen. We get this sometimes when using zsyncer to sync large
amounts of stuff. It seems to depend on the client: IE seems to have its
own timeout, regardless of what the server does; whereas Mozilla
seems to be happy to wait for ages.

> 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?

I'm not clear - are you worried about each xml-rpc call timing out, or the
whole batch of them?
If the latter, you could just call RESPONSE.write() after
each xml-rpc call. 
If the individual calls DO take too long, you might try
working with threads (tricky!). Or run it as a separate process,
which could be launched by an external method e.g. using os.system("command &")
to put the separate process in the background.
This way, the external method can return immediately.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's ZOOMING INDEFATIGABLE HEATHEN POLAR BEAR!
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