On Jul 13, 6:06 am, Vincent Gulinao <vincent.guli...@gmail.com> wrote: > lst = list() > > (lst populated by async twisted deferred callbacks) > > while True: > if len(lst) == SOME_NUMBER: > return lst > > Q1: is this a common OK practice? I'm worried infinite loops hogs memory. > Q2: operating on list from threads (mostly appends) must be safe, > right (synchronization)?
Q1: I'll answer your question with another. What's so fundamentally different between your infinite loop and this one: while len(lst) != SOME_NUMBER: pass return lst which is not an "infinite loop"[1]. Why would yours be any worse in terms of memory than mine? Are you allocating anything that would hog memory? Of course, like Piet said, it *will* hog your CPU, so you want a time.sleep(.1) in there, at the least. Of course, the question is: why aren't you using a semaphore to let you know you can proceed, and make the provider increment the semaphore? [1] -- well, it can be, if len(lst) == SOME_NUMBER never comes about, and I'd hazard a guess that that's pretty much where your fear of memory hogging comes from: it's easy to allocate stuff and not deallocate it within a cycle, only to find the bounds on that cycle going awry. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
