timer3 0.1.2

Introduction

The timer3 module lets you schedule Python functions at specific times, or at an interval. It can be used as a replacement to threading.Timer, the difference is that timer3 is always only using a single thread (unless you manually start more of them)

You should never use this to apply expensive operations, as this would not be effective when running in a single thread, rather you should make the timer move the operations to a execution pool (like a thread/multiprocessing pool, or maybe sending a message):

>>> pool = multiprocessing.Pool()
>>> timer3.apply_after(10000, pool.apply_async, (expensive_fun, ))

$ pip install timer3

>>> import timer3
>>> timer3.apply_after(msecs, fun, args, kwargs, priority=0)

>>> timer3.apply_interval(msecs, fun, args, kwargs, priority=0)

>>> timer3.apply_at(datetime, fun, args, kwargs, priority=0)

Cancelling timers

The apply_* functions returns a timer3.Entry instance, you can use this to cancel the execution:

>>> tref = timer3.apply_after(msecs, fun, args, kwargs)
>>> tref.cancel()

Running custom Timer threads

When using the module interface a default timer thread is started as soon as you schedule something. If you want to keep track of the thread manually, you can use the timer3.Timer class:

>>> timer = timer3.Timer()
>>> timer.apply_after(msecs, fun, args, kwargs)
>>> timer.stop() # stops the thread and joins it.