Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com>: > Peeking at the code, it appears to use a heapq-based priority queue. > Why would a balanced binary tree be better?
AFAIK, a heap queue doesn't allow for the deletion of a random element forcing you to leave the canceled timers in the queue to be deleted later. In a very typical scenario, networking entities start timers very frequently (depending on the load, maybe at 100..1000 Hz) but cancel virtually every one of them, leading to some wakeup churn and extra memory load. I don't know if the churn is better or worse than the tree balancing overhead. Imagine a web server that received HTTP connections. You might want to specify a 10-minute idle timeout for the connections. In the heapq timer implementation, your connection objects are kept in memory for 10 minutes even if they are closed gracefully because the canceled timer maintains a reference to the object. Of course, it may be that the heapq implementation sets the callback to None leaving only the minimal timer object lingering and waiting to come out of the digestive tract. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
