When to thread?

Question

I have never written any code that uses threads.

I have a web application that accepts a POST request, and creates an image based on the data in the body of the request.

Would I want to spin off a thread for the image creation, as to prevent the server from hanging until the image is created? Is this an appropriate use, or merely a solution looking for a problem ?

Please correct any misunderstandings I may have.

Answer 1

Rather than thinking about handling this via threads or even processes, consider using a distributed task manager such as Celery to manage this sort of thing.

Answer 2

Usual approach for handling HTTP requests synchronously is to spawn (or re-use one in the pool) new thread for each request as soon as it comes.

However, python threads are not very good for HTTP, due to GIL and some i/o and other calls blocking whole app, including other threads.

You should look into multiprocessing module for this usage. Spawn some worker processes, and then pass requests to them to process.