I am trying to run a thread more than once and keep getting an error:
RuntimeError: threads can only be started once
I have tried reading up multithreading and implementing it in my code without any luck.
Here is the function I am threading:
def receive(q):
host = ""
port = 13000
buf = 1024
addr = (host,port)
Sock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM)
Sock.bind(addr)
(data, addr) = Sock.recvfrom(buf)
q.put(data)
Here is the code I want to run:
q = Queue.Queue()
r = threading.Thread(target=receive, args=(q,))
while True:
r.start()
if q.get() == "stop":
print "Stopped"
break
print "Running program"
When the stop
message gets sent, the program should break out of the while loop, but it does not run due to multithreading. The while loop should constantly print out Running program
, until the stop
message is sent.
The queue is used to receive the variable data
from the receive
function (which is the stop
).
Here is a working example (for python 2.7).
The program has two modes of operation:
- with no arguments it runs the receive loop
- with arguments it sends a datagram
Note how r.start()
and r.terminate()
are called outside of the while loop in client
.
Also, receive
has a while True
loop.
import sys
import socket
from multiprocessing import Process, Queue
UDP_ADDR = ("", 13000)
def send(m):
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
sock.sendto(m, UDP_ADDR)
def receive(q):
buf = 1024
Sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
Sock.bind(UDP_ADDR)
while True:
(data, addr) = Sock.recvfrom(buf)
q.put(data)
def client():
q = Queue()
r = Process(target = receive, args=(q,))
r.start()
print "client loop started"
while True:
m = q.get()
print "got:", m
if m == "stop":
break
print "loop ended"
r.terminate()
if __name__ == '__main__':
args = sys.argv
if len(args) > 1:
send(args[1])
else:
client()
I think the problem is once the thread is started, calling thread.start() again throws the error.
Using a try block would might work as a simple fix:
while True:
try:
r.start()
except Exception:
#or except RunTimeError:
pass
if q.get() == "stop":
print "Stopped"
break
print "Running program"