[python-win32] ISAPI and threading

[Mark Hammond]

On 8/12/2009 9:45 AM, Preston Landers wrote:
> Someone had mentioned needing to restrict the worker pool to a single
> thread but indicated they didn't know how to do that.  I searched
> around MSDN and couldn't find anything relevant.  I also checked the
> PyWin32 ISAPI code and didn't see anything that appeared to start a
> new thread.  Does anyone know how to force single threading in this
> scenario?

Finding out where the thread was created should be your first goal.  You 
are correct that pywin32's ISAPI support doesn't create threads except 
when establishing that thread-pool - which only happens when you 
explicitly sub-class that threaded implementation.

Obviously though, I've no insight into what ISAPI itself does, but it is 
reasonable to assume it uses threading to ensure a single ISAPI request 
doesn't block the entire server.  thread.get_ident() will tell you 
indirectly how many threads you are dealing with.

The other option is just to use a lock - create a global lock object and 
have every request acquire it and release it when done.  You should then 
find only 1 thread is ever actually running in your code while the rest 
are blocked waiting for the lock.  As noted above though, this may 
severely impact performance...

HTH,

Mark