reimport module every n seconds

[Roy Smith]

In article <ijjo0p$3dm$1 at panix5.panix.com>, aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) 
wrote:

> In article 
> <6cde71c6-5c56-40ea-9849-50fc44e5decc at o14g2000prb.googlegroups.com>,
> Santiago Caracol  <santiago.caracol at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >a server program of mine uses data which are compiled to a Python
> >module for efficiency reasons. In some module of the server program I
> >import the data:
> >
> >from data import data
> >
> >As the data often changes, I would like to reimport it every n (e.g.
> >10) seconds.
> 
> Don't do that.  ;-)  I suggest using exec instead.  However, I would be
> surprised if import worked faster than, say, JSON (more precisely, I
> doubt that it's enough faster to warrnat this kludge).

I'm with Aahz.  Don't do that.

I don't know what you're doing, but I suspect an even better solution 
would be to have your program run a "reconfigure" thread which listens 
on a UDP socket and reads a JSON object from it.  Or, at the very least, 
which listens for a signal which kicks it to re-read some JSON from a 
disk file.  This will be more responsive when the data changes quickly 
and more efficient when it changes slowly.  As opposed to just polling 
for changes every 10 seconds.