Custom implementation of python queue to use dict instead of dqueue

Question

A bit of context: I have 100 addresses that can send transactions to a blockchain, and I have a web app that works like this:

1. Get request and handle it in a thread
2. Get a free address from the queue
3. Send a transaction
4. Return address to the queue

It's important to know that one address cannot send two transactions at once.

My approach was to make a custom python queue that uses a dict of "address: free/taken" instead of the normal queue.

Its good for two reasons:

1. I need to be able to get a random address for the dict
2. The base queue get and put method already handle thread-locking and timeout.

This seems to work, but I would like some feedback on it.

from queue import Queue
from enum import Enum
import random


class ChannelStatuses(Enum):
    FREE = 0
    TAKEN = 1
    UNDERFUNDED = 2


class ChannelDict(Queue):
    def __init__(self, channels_seeds):
        # Init base queue
        super(ChannelDict, self).__init__(len(channels_seeds))
        # Change queue from a 'dqueue' object to a dict full of free channels
        self.queue = {channel: ChannelStatuses.FREE for channel in channels_seeds}

    def _get(self):
        # Get a list of all free channels
        free_channels = self.get_free_channels()
        # Select a random free channel
        selected_channel = random.choice(free_channels)[0]
        # Change channel state to taken
        self.queue[selected_channel] = ChannelStatuses.TAKEN
        return selected_channel

    def _put(self, channel):
        # Change channel state to free
        self.queue[channel] = ChannelStatuses.FREE

    def _qsize(self):
        # Base queue checks if the queue is not empty by checking the length of the queue (_qsize() != 0)
        # We need to check it by checking how many channels are free
        return len(self.get_free_channels())

    def get_free_channels(self):
        # Get a list of channels with "FREE" status
        return list(filter(lambda item: item[1] == ChannelStatuses.FREE, self.queue.items()))

"channel" is another word for "address"

Used this answer as inspiration: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16506527/2126254

More context on how get/put are used,these methods are exposed:

@contextmanager
def get_channel(self, timeout=CHANNEL_QUEUE_TIMEOUT):
    """
    Get the next available channel
    :param float timeout: (Optional) How long to wait before raising an exception
    :return next avilable channel
    :rtype str

    :raises KinErrors.ChannelBusyError
    """
    try:
        channel = self.channels.get(True, timeout=timeout)
    except queue.Empty:
        raise ChannelsBusyError()

    try:
        yield channel
    finally:
        self.put_channel(channel)

def put_channel(self, timeout=CHANNEL_PUT_TIMEOUT):
    """
    Return a channel to the queue
    :param float timeout: (Optional) How long to wait before raising an exception

    :raises KinErrors.ChannelsFullError
    """
    try:
        self.channels.put(True, timeout=timeout)
    except queue.Full:
        raise ChannelsFullError()

And the user will use:

with get_channel() as channel:
    #send transaction

Answer 1

1. Review

1. There is no docstring for ChannelDict. The text in the post would make a good start.

2. A ChannelDict is not a dictionary (it doesn't support the mapping interface, __getitem__ and __setitem__ and so on), so the name is a bit misleading.

3. ChannelDict is not specialized for channels: it would work for any kind of object. A name like RandomQueue would make it easier for the reader to understand the purpose of the code.

4. ChannelDict inherits from queue.Queue but has a different interface for initialization (it takes an iterable of channels instead of a maximum size). Perhaps this is convenient for your use case but it makes the code a little harder to understand because you can't just say "it's just like a Queue except that it gets items in random order", you have to explain the difference in initialization and that you can't set a maximum size.

5. The algorithm for getting a random item from the queue takes time proportional to the number of items, because get_free_channels has to loop over all the items looking for any that are free.

6. ChannelStatuses.UNDERFUNDED is declared but not used.

2. Revised code

One way to efficiently pick a random item (instead of looping over all the items) is to keep the available items in a list, and to swap the randomly selected item with the last item in the list before popping the selected item.

from queue import Queue
from random import randrange

class RandomQueue(Queue):
    """Variant of Queue that retrieves items in a random order."""
    def _init(self, maxsize):
        self.queue = []

    def _qsize(self):
        return len(self.queue)

    def _put(self, item):
        self.queue.append(item)

    def _get(self):
        queue = self.queue
        i = randrange(len(queue))
        queue[i], queue[-1] = queue[-1], queue[i]
        return queue.pop()