i have a threaded daemon which occasionally hangs because of some stalling in the threadpool a- whats the best way to shut it down ? attempts to ctl-c / kill it seem to be interpreted by a random thread. the only way to kill it is a kill -9 the python threading docs said that was the expected behavior, and that it could be avoided by using signal. I figured twisted might have something in it already to handle shutting down a reactor with active threads. the threads docs for twisted are a little light. b- i'm trying to figure out the cause of the stalling in the threadpool from the status messages i'm printing, I'm seeing the main python code firing fine, but the threadpool is just stuck - nothing dispatched to it seems to clean up i wonder if it might be related to a few tickets i've seen http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/2448 http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3923 i'm trying to figure out a way to reliably test this. i've got a ssh manhole running via conch ( and instructions from the twisted book ) can anyone suggest a good way to test and try to debug what is going on? i'm extremely uninformed when it comes to python threads.