Threading an UDP server

Question

I would like to make a multi-threading UDP server in Python.

The purpose is to be able to connect several clients to the server (not sockets connections but username and password), act with each of them and do some actions on the server. All at the same time.

I am a little confuse with all the different type of threading and I don't know what to use.

To be clearer this is exactly what I want to do at the same time :

• Wait for clients to send data for the first time and register their ip in a database
• Act with "connected" clients by waiting for them to send datagrams and respond to them
• Be able to act with the server. For exemple, change a client's password in my database

Answer 1

I would have a look at a framework that is good at handling asynchronous io. The idea is to not have a thread per socket and block until you receive data, but instead let one thread handle many sockets at once. This scales well if you want your server to handle many clients.

For example:

• Gevent - "a coroutine-based Python networking library", example
• Twisted - "an event-driven networking engine", example
• Eventlet - "a concurrent networking library", example (TCP, but it uses a patched socket so you can also refer to the Python wiki page about UDP Communication)