How to make worker threads quit after work is finished in a multithreaded producer-consumer pattern?

Question

I am trying to implement a multithreaded producer-consumer pattern using Queue.Queue in Python 2.7. I am trying to figure out how to make the consumers, i.e. the worker threads,

Answer 1

Just for completeness sake: You could also enqueue a stop signal which is -(thread count). Each thread then can increment it by one and re queue it only if the stop signal is != 0.

    if data < 0: # negative numbers are used to indicate that the worker should stop
        if data < -1:
            q.put(data + 1)
        # Commit suicide.
        print 'worker', n, 'is exiting'
        break

But i'd personally go with Travis Mehlinger or Daniel Sanchez answer.