I am writing a server program with one producer and multiple consumers, what confuses me is only the first task producer put into the queue gets consumed, after which tasks enqueued no longer get consumed, they remain in the queue forever.

from multiprocessing import Process, Queue, cpu_count
from http import httpserv
import time

def work(queue):
    while True:
        task = queue.get()
        if task is None:
            break
        time.sleep(5)
        print "task done:", task
    queue.put(None)

class Manager:
    def __init__(self):
        self.queue = Queue()
        self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES = cpu_count()

    def start(self):
        self.workers = [Process(target=work, args=(self.queue,))
                        for i in xrange(self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES)]
        for w in self.workers:
            w.start()

        httpserv(self.queue)

    def stop(self):
        self.queue.put(None)
        for i in range(self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES):
            self.workers[i].join()
        queue.close()

Manager().start()

The producer is a HTTP server which put a task in the queue once receive a request from the user. It seems that consumer processes are still blocked when there are new tasks in the queue, which is weird.

P.S. Another two questions not relating to the above, I am not sure if it's better to put HTTP server in its own process other than the main process, if yes how can I make the main process keep running before all children processes end. Second question, what's the best way to stop the HTTP server gracefully?

Edit: add producer code, it's just a simple python wsgi server:

import fapws._evwsgi as evwsgi
from fapws import base

def httpserv(queue):
    evwsgi.start("0.0.0.0", 8080)
    evwsgi.set_base_module(base)

    def request_1(environ, start_response):
        start_response('200 OK', [('Content-Type','text/html')])
        queue.put('task_1')
        return ["request 1!"]

    def request_2(environ, start_response):
        start_response('200 OK', [('Content-Type','text/html')])
        queue.put('task_2')
        return ["request 2!!"]

    evwsgi.wsgi_cb(("/request_1", request_1))
    evwsgi.wsgi_cb(("/request_2", request_2))

    evwsgi.run()

I think there must be something wrong with the web server part, as this works perfectly:

from multiprocessing import Process, Queue, cpu_count
import random
import time


def serve(queue):
    works = ["task_1", "task_2"]
    while True:
        time.sleep(0.01)
        queue.put(random.choice(works))


def work(id, queue):
    while True:
        task = queue.get()
        if task is None:
            break
        time.sleep(0.05)
        print "%d task:" % id, task
    queue.put(None)


class Manager:
    def __init__(self):
        self.queue = Queue()
        self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES = cpu_count()

    def start(self):
        print "starting %d workers" % self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES
        self.workers = [Process(target=work, args=(i, self.queue,))
                        for i in xrange(self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES)]
        for w in self.workers:
            w.start()

        serve(self.queue)

    def stop(self):
        self.queue.put(None)
        for i in range(self.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES):
            self.workers[i].join()
        self.queue.close()


Manager().start()

Sample output:

starting 2 workers
0 task: task_1
1 task: task_2
0 task: task_2
1 task: task_1
0 task: task_1