I've got a real-time telemetry problem I'd like guidance on. The basics are obvious: a stream of UDP multicast packets are arriving at a given address/port. msg = recv(), then decode and display that msg, and all's well. But what if the next packet arrives before the first msg has been fully processed, or worse, what if the next TWO packets have arrived before we've gotten back to the recv() loop? Since this is a real-time telemetry situation, I'd like to (a) recognize that there's more than one packet to be dealt with, and then (b) delete/ignore all packets that in the multicast reception buffer except for the most recent.
I have spent a few hours trying to get recv() to work in a non-blocking mode and to return a status showing how many separate packets are in the received multicast queue, to no avail.
I'm using matplotlib/tkinter for the display of the data, that (plus hey, it's Python) is why operating on each packet is a lengthy operation.
Am I way off in the weeds here? Is there a better approach?