[Ns-bugs] [Bug 375] Ctrl-C does not always work when running Python simulations

[code@nsnam.ece.gatech.edu]

http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=375





--- Comment #1 from Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro <gjcarneiro at gmail.com>  2008-12-25 15:15:52 EDT ---
Created an attachment (id=342)
 --> (http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=342)
rough patch

I had a first patch.  The naive approach:

        while (!ns3::Simulator::IsFinished())
        {        
            if (PyEval_ThreadsInitialized())
                py_thread_state = PyEval_SaveThread();
            ns3::Simulator::RunOneEvent();
            if (py_thread_state)
                PyEval_RestoreThread(py_thread_state);
            PyErr_CheckSignals();
            if (PyErr_Occurred())
                return NULL;
        }

Problems:

 1- I had to patch ns3::Simulator::IsFinished() to consider also the m_stop
variable of the scheduler, otherwise my custom loop will ignore the
Simulator::Stop() call;

 2- Obviously there is an overhead of checking for signals on _every_ simulator
iteration.  On my system, the measured overhead (in the csma-bridge.py example)
is 3.5% if the threading python module is not imported, or 4.3% with threading
imported (there's an optimization that avoids the Python GIL calls if threading
is not being used).

I then modified the patch a bit.  The attached patch takes a parameter
'signal_check_frequency', which is the number of iterations to run before
checking for signals, or -1 to not check for signals at all.  With the default
value of 100, the overhead is only 0.7% for non-threaded programs, which I
think is acceptable.  Ctrl-C is, of course, very responsive.

A better approach would be, perhaps, to create a thread which asks python to
check for interrupts every second or so, and sets a global flag when interrupt
is detected, so that the simulation loop can check for that variable, which
should have less overhead.  But I think this patch is much less complicated and
has reasonably low overhead, so I'll settle for it, if no objections.

I have to ask, what to do with the Simulator::IsFinished change?  Is it OK to
commit, or propose a new API call to do what I want, or...?


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