Using gevent monkey patching with threading makes thread work serially

Question

I am using gevent and I am monkey patching everything.
It seems like the monkey patching causes the threading to work serially.

My code:

import threading
from gevent import monkey; monkey.patch_all()

class ExampleThread(threading.Thread):
    def run(self):
        do_stuff()  # takes a few minutes to finish
        print 'finished working'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    worker = ExampleThread()
    worker.start()
    print 'this should be printed before the worker finished'

So the thread is not working as expected.
But if I remove the monkey.patch_all() it is working fine.
The problem is that I need the monkey.patch_all() for using gevent (now shown in the code above)

My solution:

I changed the

monkey.patch_all() 

to

monkey.patch_all(thread=False)

so I am not patching the thread.

Solution

When threads are monkey patched in gevent, they behave as coroutines. This means that you have to explicitly yield control to make it possible for other coroutines to execute.

The way to do this is call a blocking operation that has been patched (this will yield automatically) or gevent.sleep:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from gevent import monkey, sleep
monkey.patch_all()
import threading

class ExampleThread(threading.Thread):
    def run(self):
        for i in xrange(10):
            print 'working'
            sleep()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    worker = ExampleThread()
    worker.start()
    print 'this will be printed after the first call to sleep'

Comments

[yossi]

i have edited my question. i cant use sleep because my work takes a few minutes,

[jcollado]

@yossi If you have a task that takes a long time to complete and isn't possible to yield control at some point, then you need real threads instead of coroutines. In such a case, I'd say you're better off not patching threads.

[Merlin]

I found this interesting. What would be the use case of this vs the standard theading module.

[jcollado]

@Merlin The motivation section in PEP342 might be a good source for that. In summary, threads aren't really cheap and if we need a lot of them, then it's worth considering alternatives.

[F79]

how to use this?