[PyQt] Threading crashes

[andre hotz]

Mark Summerfield schrieb:
> On 2010-04-20, andre hotz wrote:
>   
>> Mark Summerfield schrieb:
>>     
>>> On 2010-04-20, andre hotz wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Hey,
>>>>
>>>> I have a problem with my QThreads (running on windows). It is the first
>>>> time I use multithreading, so I am probably doing something wrong ;)
>>>>
>>>> The situation is as follows: I have a QTreeWidget which works like a
>>>> filebrowser, listing a few thousand files. Creating
>>>> the treeitems from the files is pretty fast, but I also want the
>>>> treeWidget to display more information about the files.
>>>> This is taking some time depending on the quantity of the files. So 
>>>>         
> what
>   
>>>> I did is to first fill the treeView with all the filenames.
>>>> After that, I start an update-threat, which loops through all the items
>>>> in the treeWidget, gathers its data and fills the additional
>>>> columns in the treeView with the data. While the thread is updating the
>>>> treeWidget, the user can already work with the files and does not need
>>>> to wait for the update to finish.
>>>>
>>>> This all works pretty well.
>>>>         
>>> I think you've been pretty lucky to have it work at all!
>>>       
>> hehe, yeah, I was pretty happy when I got it working the first time ;)
>>
>>     
>>> Qt does not provide any means of locking items or views. As a
>>> consequence, Qt does _not_ support updating models, scenes, or items in
>>> models, or items in widgets such as QTreeWidgetItems or
>>> QTableWidgetItems, etc. outside the main (GUI) thread. So any such
>>> update is potentially the source of a crash.
>>>       
>> hm, yes, this might explain the crashes..
>>
>>     
>>> One technique that could be used is to hold the data in a thread-safe
>>> data structure and read data from that into the GUI as needed (locking
>>> the data structure or each item read from it as needed), and updating
>>> the data from one or more secondary threads (locking as needed).
>>>       
>> That sounds like it could work. Would it be possible to hold the data as
>> you said, but when the update thread is finished, let it emit a signal
>> to the treeWidget which then updates itself with the given data
>> structure? Or does emitting signals from another thread also not work?
>>     
>
> One of the great things about signals and slots is that they work safely
> across threads:-)
>
> So you can certainly emit a signal in a secondary thread that's
> connected to a main (GUI) thread slot. And since you can pass values via
> signals, if you had simple things like ints, doubles, and QStrings, you
> could even call the main thread every time you updated the data on a
> single file in the secondary thread (at some cost in performance that
> may or may not matter) to give the main thread the info you want.
>
>
>   
I just updated my code so it uses signals now and it works way better. I 
still got crashes because of the thread.terminate() so I replaced it 
with wait() for now, makes things a bit slower, but that's still better 
than a crash ;)

So thanks a lot for your help!
Andre