How to pause and resume a thread using the threading module?

Question

I have a long process that I've scheduled to run in a thread, because otherwise it will freeze the UI in my wxpython application.

I'm using:

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

to start the thread and it works, but I don't know how to pause and resume the thread. I looked in the Python docs for the above methods, but wasn't able to find them.

Could anyone suggest how I could do this?

Answer 1

I did some speed tests as well, the time to set the flag and for action to be taken is pleasantly fast 0.00002 secs on a slow 2 processor Linux box.

Example of thread pause test using set() and clear() events:

import threading import time  # This function gets called by our thread.. so it basically becomes the thread init...                 def wait_for_event(e):     while True:         print('\tTHREAD: This is the thread speaking, we are Waiting for event to start..')         event_is_set = e.wait()         print('\tTHREAD:  WHOOOOOO HOOOO WE GOT A SIGNAL  : %s' % event_is_set)         # or for Python >= 3.6         # print(f'\tTHREAD:  WHOOOOOO HOOOO WE GOT A SIGNAL  : {event_is_set}')         e.clear()  # Main code e = threading.Event() t = threading.Thread(name='pausable_thread',                       target=wait_for_event,                      args=(e,)) t.start()  while True:     print('MAIN LOOP: still in the main loop..')     time.sleep(4)     print('MAIN LOOP: I just set the flag..')     e.set()     print('MAIN LOOP: now Im gonna do some processing')     time.sleep(4)     print('MAIN LOOP:  .. some more processing im doing   yeahhhh')     time.sleep(4)     print('MAIN LOOP: ok ready, soon we will repeat the loop..')     time.sleep(2)