Multi-threaded UDP server with Python

Question

I want to create a simple video streaming (actually, image streaming) server that can manage different protocols (TCP Push/Pull, UDP Push/Pull/Multicast).

I managed to get TCP Push/Pull working with the SocketServer.TCPServer class and ThreadinMixIn for processing each connected client in a different thread.

But now that I'm working on the UDP protocol, I just realized that ThreadinMixIn creates a thread per call of handle() per client query (as there's nothing such as a "connection" in UDP).

The problem is I need to process a sequence of queries by the same client, for all the clients. How could I manage that ?

The only way I see I could handle that is to have a list of (client adresses, processing thread) and send each query to the matching thread (or create a new one if the client haven't sent any thread yet). Is there an easier way to do that ?

Thanks !

PS : I can't use any external or too "high-level" library for this as it's a school subject meant to understand how sockets work.

Answer 1

Take a look at Twisted . This will remove the need to do any thread dispatch from your application. You still have to match up packets to a particular session in order to handle them, but this isn't difficult (use a port per client and dispatch based on the port, or require packets in a session to always come from the same address and use the peer address, or use one of the existing protocols that solves this problem such as SIP).