Patch #742598 from Michael Pomraning: add .timeout attribute to SocketServer that will call

.handle_timeout() method when no requests are received within the timeout period.

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Doc/library/socketserver.rst b/Doc/library/socketserver.rst
index c900ea7..2c85c86 100644
--- a/Doc/library/socketserver.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/socketserver.rst
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ to behave autonomously; the default is :const:`False`, meaning that Python will
 not exit until all threads created by :class:`ThreadingMixIn` have exited.
 
 Server classes have the same external methods and attributes, no matter what
-network protocol they use:
+network protocol they use.
 
 
 Server Creation Notes
@@ -193,6 +193,13 @@ The server classes support the following class variables:
    The type of socket used by the server; :const:`socket.SOCK_STREAM` and
    :const:`socket.SOCK_DGRAM` are two possible values.
 
+.. data:: timeout
+
+   Timeout duration, measured in seconds, or :const:`None` if no timeout is desired.
+   If no incoming requests are received within the timeout period, 
+   the :meth:`handle_timeout` method is called and then the server resumes waiting for 
+   requests.
+
 There are various server methods that can be overridden by subclasses of base
 server classes like :class:`TCPServer`; these methods aren't useful to external
 users of the server object.
@@ -220,6 +227,13 @@ users of the server object.
    method raises an exception.  The default action is to print the traceback to
    standard output and continue handling further requests.
 
+.. function:: handle_timeout()
+
+   This function is called when the :attr:`timeout` attribute has been set to a 
+   value other than :const:`None` and the timeout period has passed with no 
+   requests being received.  The default action for forking servers is
+   to collect the status of any child processes that have exited, while
+   in threading servers this method does nothing.
 
 .. function:: process_request(request, client_address)