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I'm trying to communicate two threads through threading.Event().

The first thread is listener which is the keyboard logger from pynput. Inside it, there is a function called write_keys() that will read each key and concatenate them, passing the concatenator to a foo() function, this one will wait to execute.

The second thread is timer, which will show the idle duration, when a condition is complete, will set the event to trigger the foo() function.

Currently this is not working and is slowing down the listener, where I can only type one key on each event

from ctypes import Structure, windll, c_uint, sizeof, byref
from threading import Thread, Event
from pynput import keyboard
from time import sleep

keys = []
message = ' '

# LAST INPUT INFO
class LASTINPUTINFO(Structure):
    _fields_ = [
        ('cbSize', c_uint),
        ('dwTime', c_uint),
        ]

def get_idle_duration():
    while True:
        lastInputInfo = LASTINPUTINFO()
        lastInputInfo.cbSize = sizeof(lastInputInfo)
        windll.user32.GetLastInputInfo(byref(lastInputInfo))
        millis = windll.kernel32.GetTickCount() - lastInputInfo.dwTime
        millis = millis / 1000.0
        print(f'\t{millis}')
        sleep(1)
        if int(millis) == 3: # every 3 sec user is AFK, trigger event.set()
            print(f'\t{millis}')
            event.set()

def foo(k):
    event.wait()
    print(f'Event set: {event.is_set()}')
    print(f'{k}')
    print('PROCESS FINISHED\n')
    sleep(3)
    event.clear()

def write_keys(keys):
    global message
    for key in keys:
        k = str(key).replace("'", "")
        print(k, len(k))
        message += k # concatenate keys
    if (len(message)) >= 3:
        foo(message)

def on_press(key):
    global keys
    keys.append(key)
    write_keys(keys)
    keys = []

if __name__ == "__main__":
    event = Event()

    listener = keyboard.Listener(on_press=on_press)
    timer = Thread(target=get_idle_duration)

    listener.start()
    timer.start()

EXPECTED OUTPUT:

 listener   timer
   k          0
              1
   e          0
   y          0
              1
              2
              3
output: key

gist.github: link to the code

I'm pretty new to events in threading library, any advice will be considered.

Y4RD13
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  • Does this answer your question? [What's the point of multithreading in Python if the GIL exists?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52507601/whats-the-point-of-multithreading-in-python-if-the-gil-exists) – tevemadar Jul 16 '20 at 08:26
  • @tevemadar it doesn't, the problem is not GIL. – Y4RD13 Jul 16 '20 at 08:26
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    `threading` library is not meant to your active polling use-case, try `multiprocessing` for real parallelism. – tevemadar Jul 16 '20 at 08:27
  • even so, is slowing down with multiprocessing, it seems the issue is about how the threads work pynput when type or realse a key – Y4RD13 Jul 16 '20 at 08:29
  • I can get the threads going in normal speed, but the output are mutiply randomly, I will update the question – Y4RD13 Jul 16 '20 at 08:30

0 Answers0