Using win32com with multithreading

Question

I am working on a web app with CherryPy that needs to access a few applications via COM.

Right now I create a new instance of the application with each request, which means each request waits 3 seconds for the application to start and 0.01 for the actual job.

I would like to start each COM application once and keep it alive and reuse it for a few seconds on the following requests because most of the time it is used by a burst of 5-10 ajax requests, then nothing for hours.

Is it possible to share a COM abject across all the threads of a CherryPy application?

Here is the summary of a few experiments that show how it is working now on each request and how it does not work across threads.

The following code successfully starts and stops Excel:

>>> import pythoncom, win32com.client
>>> def start():
    global xl
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')

>>> def stop():
    global xl
    xl.quit()
    xl = None

>>> start()
>>> stop()

But the following code starts Excel and closes it after 3 seconds.

>>> import pythoncom, win32com.client, threading, time
>>> def start():
    global xl
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()
    xl = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')
    time.sleep(3)

>>> threading.Thread(target=start).start()

I added the call to CoInitialize() otherwise the xl object would not work (see this post).

And I added the 3 second pause, so I could see on the task manager that the EXCEL.EXE process starts and is alive for 3 seconds.

Why does it die after the thread that started it ends?

I checked the documentation of CoInitialize(), but I couldn't understand if it is possible to get it to work in multithreaded environment.

Answer 1

The answer from @Mauriusz Jamro was really helpful. Just to add to it, also ensure that you do:

pythoncom.CoUninitialize ()

in the end so that there's no memory leak. You can call it somewhere after using CoInitialize() and before your process ends.

P.S.- I didn't have enough reputation to comment under his answer, so had to resort to writing a new answer. Cheers!