Asynchronous servers and frameworks are a popular way to create highlyscalable systems. Although WSGI isn't explicitlydesigned to support them, putting a WSGI application in an asynchronousserver isn't totally foolish: many WSGI applications won't be doinganything that can block.

(Technically disk IO can block, but Python on Unix doesn't have any wayto do asynchronous disk IO without using threads.)

However, there is one serious fly in the ointment: the WSGI specrequires a synchronous interface for reading the

For my sins, I am on one of the aliases here that gets a certain amountof reports of spamming theoretically committed by UofT IP addresses. (Iam not one of the people who has to deal with them, fortunately; it isa thankless job). This exposes me to a certain amount of good examplesof how not to report spam.

Today's example comes to us from an official government organizationin a large Southern American country. All the information they gaveus was:

• the date (with

This week, we:

• got 13,681 messages from 253 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,870 sessions from 835 different IP addresses.
• received 303,478 connections from at least 47,309 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 7 connections being checked at once.

Connection volume is majorly up from last week ; other numbers are up slightly,except the highwater (which is down). The per day table:

As a followup to what I wrote yesterday about prompt signal handlingin programs , it's worthwhile to pointout a little problem in Python with signal handling.

As I've noted before , Python normally turnsmany signals into exceptions. It turns out that this has an importantconsequence: it delays processing of signals , because Python onlyprocesses signal exceptions in the interpreter, ie when you're runningPython bytecodes.

(Contrary to the documentation, sys.setcheckinterval does not appearto control how often signal handlers are