Hi, the advice is free, so tkae it for what it's worth. Q. Is it possible to write an application for this kind of server activity in Python? I mean whether Python will be suitable for this kind of high activity load, real time app? - Absolutely, Look at Zope or Cheetah for examples of fairly large python based app servers. That doesn't mean something written quickly from scratch will work well.
Q. How much time it can take (approx.) to develop such kind of server? Very hard to say, I've written similar server code for a peer to peer tool - haven't touched the server portion in a while - and I learned a lot more about how python threads really work doing it. complete half-assed estimate - min 1 week, max 1 month. Q. Do we need multi threading? If so, then whether the Socket modules will be safe to use with multi threading? Q. What modules for networking (socket ?), database access etc should I use? This is an answer for both questions above, yes you'll need multithreading. Best idiom, each client gets a thread. and whatever else you need(your pinger thread) The socket modules are not entirely thread safe. I don't remember the problems, but they were there, and relatively solvable, if I recall corretly, most issues were non-critical in that they resulted in a bad shutdown, but didn't impact the server while running.. As for modules, I worked most with TCPSocketServer(?? is this the right name? bad bad memory - don't have the code here :) But I think you for this it may be easier to use the XMLRPC server. A lot more is done for you than the more primative SocketServers. This is a particularly good route to go, if you know XMLRPC already, or plan to add browser only clients in the future. And on another note, welcome to Python - I switched from java, as my most productive language, after visiting a client. They needed a tool built in a hurry. Some ugly XML parsing that I knew would take about a week to write. Long story short, my first day with Python I wrote a functional version of the XML code in 3 hours, and got a deliverable version of the code written the next day. And one more hint- I just switched from the TK based tKinter to wxPython - and I don't think I'm going back. Hope this helps. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list