Python Tornado - Asynchronous Request is blocking
What you are seeing is actually a browser limitation, not an issue with your code. I added some extra logging to your TestHandler
to make this clear:
class TestHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler): # localhost:8888/test
@tornado.web.asynchronous
def get(self):
print "Thread starting %s" % time.time()
t = threading.Thread(target = self.newThread)
t.start()
def newThread(self):
print "new thread called, sleeping %s" % time.time()
time.sleep(10)
self.write("Awake after 10 seconds!" % time.time())
self.finish()
If I open two curl sessions to localhost/test simultaneously, I get this on the server side:
Thread starting 1402236952.17
new thread called, sleeping 1402236952.17
Thread starting 1402236953.21
new thread called, sleeping 1402236953.21
And this on the client side:
Awake after 10 seconds! 1402236962.18
Awake after 10 seconds! 1402236963.22
Which is exactly what you expect. However in Chromium, I get the same behavior as you. I think that Chromium (perhaps all browsers) will only allow one connection at a time to be opened to the same URL. I confirmed this by making IndexHandler
run the same code as TestHandler
, except with slightly different log messages. Here's the output when opening two browser windows, one to /test
, and one to /index
:
index Thread starting 1402237590.03
index new thread called, sleeping 1402237590.03
Thread starting 1402237592.19
new thread called, sleeping 1402237592.19
As you can see both ran concurrently without issue.