There's an instrument on my LAN that sends a UDP data packet every 5-10 ms. In my application, I have a reader thread that allocates a socket with a large buffer when it starts, then enters an infinite loop to read the accumulated packets, parse them, write them to a spooler, then sleep for half a second (time.sleep(0.500)). I have several lazy consumers for the data, most of which do archiving or generate passive statistics. But one consumer (for display) needs up-to-the-moment data, and needs to wake the sleeping reader (to read the socket) before querying the spooler. What is the best way to wake a sleeping thread? (Or, alternately, is there a better way for a thread to sleep that's easier to wake?) Continue reading...
