I’m not sure if running PySide from a Python interpreter in another thread can 
ever work, since Qt itself will only run a GUI from the main thread, and in any 
case PySide appears to share the main QApplication with the C++ Qt GUI. So I’ve 
only ever managed to run a PySide GUI from the application main thread.

There are two ways I know of to keep a single-thread process responsive, though 
both involve the long-running application being broken up in some way into 
discrete steps:


  1.  Execute the application in a loop, with a call to 
QCoreApplication.processEvents() made in each iteration of the loop.
  2.  Make the innards of the long-running application into a slot that is 
designed to be called multiple times, and set a zero-second single-shot timer 
to fire at the end of the slot function – connecting the resulting signal to 
the slot itself – so that the slot will be invoked another time once the timer 
“times out”. The trick to this is the fact that even a zero-second timer will 
have to wait while the event loop processes system messages (mouse-move events 
etc.), so that just like in suggestion (1) this allows user-system interactions 
to be processed before execution of the long-running function resumes.


Stephen Morris

From: PySide <pyside-boun...@qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Israel Brewster
Sent: 04 December 2019 23:41
To: pyside@qt-project.org
Subject: [PySide] Keeping GUI responsive

I know this is a FAQ, however I haven’t been able to make any of the standard 
answers work for me. Here’s the situation:

- using PySide2 5.12.2
- I have an object (QMainWindow subclass) that contains most of the code for my 
application
- One of the functions that runs in response to user input takes around 2 
seconds to run. The GUI obviously freezes during this time (BAD!)
- Said function needs to access and modify several large variables (pandas data 
frames) from the main object

So here’s the problem: If I run this function as a separate (python) thread, 
that doesn’t help - the GUI is still frozen. I’m thinking this is due to the 
GIL, but I could be wrong about that. Running under the multiprocessing module, 
however, doesn’t appear to be an option due to the number and size of the data 
structures that the function needs to modify, and if I try just to see what 
happens, the process actually crashes.

So what are my options here? How can I keep the GUI responsive while this 
function runs, without being able to spin it off as a separate process? Or is 
the only option going to be to completely rip apart the function and try to 
re-build it in such a way that it can, somehow, still access the memory from 
the main thread, while doing the processing in a separate function?
---
Israel Brewster
Software Engineer
Alaska Volcano Observatory
Geophysical Institute - UAF
2156 Koyukuk Drive
Fairbanks AK 99775-7320
Work: 907-474-5172
cell:  907-328-9145

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