[Zope] Isolating changes that can only be done globally

[Michael Vartanyan]

Hello All,

This is probably more a Python question but maybe you will have a quick 
solution for me - I guess the greatest *multi-threaded* Python 
application provides the greatest basis for this problem domain :-)

The situation: external method that is doing a http request using 
urllib2. I don't care about the response, and whether there was any 
response at all, I just need to send the request through - thus I want 
this request to time out very fast (let it be 2 seconds). I found no 
documented way to set the timeout for urllib2, after some googling I 
found an advice to manipulate the timeout on the lower-level socket 
module, something like this:

import socket
import urllib2

def do_request():
  timeout = 2
  socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout)
  req = urllib2.Request(url='http://my.site.com/do_something_quick')
  response = urllib2.urlopen(req)

The problem is this way this default timeout is set for _all_ new socket 
created by this Python process using the socket module. Even if I return 
the default to its previous state after the request it won't help me 
much - there are three more threads in my Zope that should be able to 
work with default timeout. So there are two possible solutions - to find 
a (preferably documented) way of accessing and parameterizing the socket 
object created by urllib2 to make a request or to find a way to 
isolate(??) global module settings between Zope threads.

Zope 2.8.3, Python 2.4.2, FreeBSD 4.10 if this is relevant.

Any hints/TFMs?

Many thanks
Michael