The accepted solution here doesn't work for all situations,
How to implement a Lock with a timeout in Python 2.7
(In particular the last thread who owns the lock calls cond.notify() when no one holds the conditional variable)
Then, I've tried a spin lock like this:
import threading
import time
class TimeLock(object):
def __init__(self):
self._lock = threading.Lock()
def acquire_lock(self, timeout = 0):
''' If timeout = 0, do a blocking lock
else, return False at [timeout] seconds
'''
if timeout == 0:
return self._lock.acquire() # Block for the lock
current_time = start_time = time.time()
while current_time < start_time + timeout:
if self._lock.acquire(False): # Contend for the lock, without blocking
return True
else:
time.sleep(1)
current_time = time.time()
# Time out
return False
def release_lock(self):
self._lock.release()
However after trying, the spin lock will almost always starve against the blocking lock. Is there other solutions?
