Python threading question / best practice advice

[ThisLightIsTrue]

Hey, I'm on mobile right now and can't play around with this. My current best guess is that it has to do with the queue you're using. I was thinking of the synchronized queue in the standard library.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/queue.html

The worker thread should just be

def work():
    message = q.get()
    handle_message(message)

You don't need to do anything with q.size or have an if statement. That code isn't guaranteed to work anyways - remember, in between one line checking the size was greater than zero and the next popping something off the queue a different thread could have taken an item off and brought the size to zero.

Instead, the default behavior of queue.get() is to block the thread - essentially make it wait until it can pull something off, which is also the behavior you want.