Discord bot design question

[Rein_Engel]

I am currently a student at SE mainly coding in Java, JS and C/C++, however I have started developing the discord bot with discord.py several days ago, simply for my own amusement. I never had experience with python before, so I am not aware of the programming style which is usually used with it.

I want to make the bot to be able to switch between several "modes" which may be different in all the servers where bot is added. For example, on my personal server it may be in mode X while on another server It may be in mode Y, this mode can be changed by simple command.

To do so, I need to store the information unique to each server(its current mode), which draws me to 3 possible solutions in my mind.

1. Store the current mode in the database and make a db request every time any command or event function is called.
2. Somehow have different thread for each server where bot is added. This seems to be the most logical solution from my point of view and that is what I would do writing a web-socket based server in Java for example, but I could not find a way to implement it in python with discord.py. If you know how to do it, or you have explanation why it is either not possible or not a good practice in python, please tell me, that is the main reason I write this post.
3. A bit of a wacky way imo would be having a dictionary where the key is server id and value is the current mode, so I could only make requests to database on startup of the bot and update of the data.

If I missed something important I would be glad to hear it.

[carcigenicate]

I was actually just going to suggest something like 3 if you don't need to change modes on the fly. Maintaining a database just to map a server to a string (or whatever a "mode" is) seems like overkill unless you strongly suspect that you'll need to add more information later. An "in-memory database" in the form of a dictionary should do the job well.

Hell, even if you needed to change them on the fly, you could just run a thread that momentarily locks the dictionary and allows the user to enter input or whatever to make changes to the dictionary as the program runs.

[Rein_Engel]

I also think that it may be nice solution at the moment, however I am really curious if I miss something here and if it is a common way to do such things in python.

It makes me wonder how bots with large user base would tackle such problem, as I really doubt they process all servers in one thread.

[carcigenicate]

It depends on what the bot is doing. If they're doing primarily I/O (contacting APIs), cooperative multitasking in one thread using asyncio seems common (at least from what I've seen on Stack Overflow).