Using win32com with multithreading

Question

I am working on a web app with CherryPy that needs to access a few applications via COM.

Right now I create a new instance of the application with each request, which means each request waits 3 seconds for the application to start and 0.01 for the actual job.

I would like to start each COM application once and keep it alive and reuse it for a few seconds on the following requests because most of the time it is used by a burst of 5-10 ajax requests, then nothing for hours.

Is it possible to share a COM abject across all the threads of a CherryPy application?

Here is the summary of a few experiments that show how it is working now on each request and how it does not work across threads.

The following code successfully starts and stops Excel:

>>> import pythoncom, win32com.client
>>> def start():
    global xl
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')

>>> def stop():
    global xl
    xl.quit()
    xl = None

>>> start()
>>> stop()

But the following code starts Excel and closes it after 3 seconds.

>>> import pythoncom, win32com.client, threading, time
>>> def start():
    global xl
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')
    time.sleep(3)

>>> threading.Thread(target=start).start()

I added the call to CoInitialize() otherwise the xl object would not work (see this post).

And I added the 3 second pause, so I could see on the task manager that the EXCEL.EXE process starts and is alive for 3 seconds.

Why does it die after the thread that started it ends?

I checked the documentation of CoInitialize(), but I couldn't understand if it is possible to get it to work in multithreaded environment.

Solution

If you want to use win32com in multiple threads you need to do a little bit more work as COMObject cannot be passed to a thread directly. You need to use CoMarshalInterThreadInterfaceInStream() and CoGetInterfaceAndReleaseStream() to pass instance between threads:

import pythoncom, win32com.client, threading, time

def start():
    # Initialize
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()

    # Get instance
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')

    # Create id
    xl_id = pythoncom.CoMarshalInterThreadInterfaceInStream(pythoncom.IID_IDispatch, xl)

    # Pass the id to the new thread
    thread = threading.Thread(target=run_in_thread, kwargs={'xl_id': xl_id})
    thread.start()

    # Wait for child to finish
    thread.join()

def run_in_thread(xl_id):
    # Initialize
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()

    # Get instance from the id
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch(
            pythoncom.CoGetInterfaceAndReleaseStream(xl_id, pythoncom.IID_IDispatch)
    )
    time.sleep(5)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    start()

For more info see: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-win32/2008-June/007788.html

Comments

[SDIdo]

Thanks a lot! I wonder why if there's a loop inside the thread the other threads are waiting. I have added a 'line' argument and was expecting same column cells in each n lines to change simultaneously.