Hi, I'm writing a reliability monitoring app but I've run into a problem. I was hoping to keep it very simple and single threaded at first but that's looking unlikely now! The crux of it is this...
gethostbyname ignores setdefaulttimeout. It seems gethostbyname asks the OS to resolve the address and the OS uses it's own timeout value ( 25 seconds ) rather than the one provided in setdefaulttimeout. 25 seconds of blocking is way too long for me, I want the response within 5 seconds or not at all but I can see no reasonable way to do this without messing with the OS which naturally I am loathe to do! The two ideas I've had so far are... Implement a cache. For this to work I'd need to avoid issuing gethostbyname until the cached address fails. Of course it will fail a little bit further down i the calling code when the app tries to use it and I'd then need it to refresh the cache and try again. That seems very kludgey to me :/ A pure python DNS lookup. This seems better but is an unknown quantity. How big a job is it to use non-blocking sockets to write a DNS lookup function with a customisable timeout? A few lines? A few hundred? I'd only need to resolve v4 addresses for the foreseeable. Any comments on these strategies, or any suggestions of methods you think might work better or be a lot easier to implement, warmly received. Roger. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
