Reputation: 453
I've got an event-driven chatbot and I'm trying to implement spam protection. I want to silence a user who is behaving badly for a period of time, without blocking the rest of the application.
Here's what doesn't work:
if user_behaving_badly():
ban( user )
time.sleep( penalty_duration ) # Bad! Blocks the entire application!
unban( user )
Ideally, if user_behaving_badly() is true, I want to start a new thread which does nothing but ban the user, then sleep for a while, unban the user, and then the thread disappears.
According to this I can accomplish my goal using the following:
if user_behaving_badly():
thread.start_new_thread( banSleepUnban, ( user, penalty ) )
"Simple" is usually an indicator of "good", and this is pretty simple, but everything I've heard about threads has said that they can bite you in unexpected ways. My question is: Is there a better way than this to run a simple delay loop without blocking the rest of the application?
Upvotes: 2
Views: 2099
Reputation: 301
Why thread at all?
do_something(user):
if(good_user(user)):
# do it
else
# don't
good_user():
if(is_user_baned(user)):
if(past_time_since_ban(user)):
user_good_user(user)
elif(is_user_bad()):
ban_user()
ban_user(user):
# add a user/start time to a hash
is_user_banned()
# check hash
# could check if expired now too, or do it seperately if you care about it
is_user_bad()
# check params or set more values in a hash
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 74645
instead of starting a thread for each ban, put the bans in a priority queue and have a single thread do the sleeping and unbanning
this code keeps two structures a heapq that allows it to quickly find the soonest ban to expire and a dict to make it possible to quickly check if a user is banned by name
import time
import threading
import heapq
class Bans():
def __init__(self):
self.lock = threading.Lock()
self.event = threading.Event()
self.heap = []
self.dict = {}
self.thread = threading.thread(target=self.expiration_thread)
self.thread.setDaemon(True)
self.thread.start()
def ban_user(self, name, duration):
with self.lock:
now = time.time()
expiration = (now+duration)
heapq.heappush(self.heap, (expiration, user))
self.dict[user] = expiration
self.event.set()
def is_user_banned(self, user):
with self.lock:
now = time.time()
return self.dict.get(user, None) > now
def expiration_thread(self):
while True:
self.event.wait()
with self.lock:
next, user = self.heap[0]
now = time.time()
duration = next-now
if duration > 0:
time.sleep(duration)
with self.lock:
if self.heap[0][0] = next:
heapq.heappop(self.heap)
del self.dict(user)
if not self.heap:
self.event.clear()
and is used like this:
B = Bans()
B.ban_user("phil", 30.0)
B.is_user_banned("phil")
Upvotes: 5
Reputation: 69182
Use a threading timer object, like this:
t = threading.Timer(30.0, unban)
t.start() # after 30 seconds, unban will be run
Then only unban is run in the thread.
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 4811
If you're using a GUI,
most GUI modules have a timer function which can abstract all the yuck multithreading stuff,
and execute code after a given time,
though still allowing the rest of the code to be executed.
For instance, Tkinter has the 'after' function.
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 1
This is language agnostic, but consider a thread to keep track of stuff. The thread keeps a data structure that has something like "username" and "banned_until" in a table. The thread is always running in the background checking the table, if banned_until is expired, it unblocks the user. Other threads go on normally.
Upvotes: 0