asyncore¶

Basic infrastructure for asynchronous socket service clients and servers.

There are only two ways to have a program on a single processor do “more than one thing at a time”. Multi-threaded programming is the simplest and most popular way to do it, but there is another very different technique, that lets you have nearly all the advantages of multi-threading, without actually using multiple threads. it’s really only practical if your program is largely I/O bound. If your program is CPU bound, then pre-emptive scheduled threads are probably what you really need. Network servers are rarely CPU-bound, however.

If your operating system supports the select() system call in its I/O library (and nearly all do), then you can use it to juggle multiple communication channels at once; doing other work while your I/O is taking place in the “background.” Although this strategy can seem strange and complex, especially at first, it is in many ways easier to understand and control than multi-threaded programming. The module documented here solves many of the difficult problems for you, making the task of building sophisticated high-performance network servers and clients a snap.