how can a child thread notify a parent thread its status?

[scriptlearner at gmail.com]

First of all, let me say thank you to all of you.  I have asked many
questions (some of them are dump questions), and you have kindly
helped me.  I am not going to reply every message to say thank-you
since that would be annoying for such group with such high daily
traffics.  Thank you very much.

Let's get back to topic of this message.
Here's how I have implemented it so far, and I am taking the queue of
work load items approach.
In my child thread, I will keep checking for available work load item
until a duration is reached.
#inside the child#
        while endTime > time.time():
            try:
                 item = self.q.get(True, 3)
            except Queue.Empty:  #what's wrong?  AttributeError: class
Queue has no attribute 'Empty'
                 print 'cant find any work load item, so lets wait and
try again later'
                 time.sleep(1) #wait and then check again
                 continue
            except:
                 print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]
                 raise
            #do the real work with load item

In my parent thread, I will initialize X (depending on a cfg file)
child threads and keep adding load items to a shared q until the
duration is reached.
#inside the parent#
        callCounter = 0
        workers = [] #a list of child threads
        totalWorkers = 250
        endTime = time.time() + duration
        for i in range(totalWorkers):
            w = Worker(q, duration, i)
            w.start() #worker, do your job now!
            workers.append(w)

        while endTime > time.time():
            time.sleep(1)
                q.put(getWorkloadItem()) #add workload itmes
                callCounter += 1 #actually can we guarantee that the
call will be sent??
                                 #should we ask each child to report
the number of calls they make?

        for i in range(totalWorkers):
            workers[i].join()    # Wait for the child threads to
finish


Overall, it seems to be working now.  Though, I still have a couple of
problems to resolve.
1. I got the following error for the codes that attempt to catch Empty
Queue exception.  What's the right way to use it?
    except Queue.Empty:
AttributeError: class Queue has no attribute 'Empty'

2. What's the best way to have each child thread to report the number
of requests they send when they are done?  To add the numbers to
another queue?

3. I will need to do some logging for response time as well as some
response contents.  I have two choices, one big log file for all
threads (both child and parent), and one log file for each thread.
Given the fact that I may have to log tons of data, I think opening
and maintaining a bunch of smaller logs may be better than dealing
with a big one (it may grow very fast).  Is there any best prastice
for logging in Python?  If I change my mind and go with one big log
file (pass it to each thread), is there anything I should be aware of
for multi-thread access (writting) to the same log file?

Again, thank you.