I unsuccessfully tried using txredis (the non blocking twisted api for redis) for a persisting message queue I'm trying to set up with a scrapy project I am working on. I found that although the client was not blocking, it became much slower than it could have been because what should have been one event in the reactor loop was split up into thousands of steps. So instead, I tried making use of redis-py (the regular blocking twisted api) and wrapping the call in a deferred thread. It works great, however I want to perform an inner deferred when I make a call to redis as I would like to set up connection pooling in attempts to speed things up further. Below is my interpretation of some sample code taken from the twisted docs for a deferred thread to illustrate my use case: #!/usr/bin/env python from twisted.internet import reactor,threads from twisted.internet.task import LoopingCall import time def main_loop(): print 'doing stuff in main loop.. do not block me!' def aBlockingRedisCall(): print 'doing lookup... this may take a while' time.sleep(10) return 'results from redis' def result(res): print res def main(): lc = LoopingCall(main_loop) lc.start(2) d = threads.deferToThread(aBlockingRedisCall) d.addCallback(result) reactor.run() if __name__=='__main__': main() And here is my alteration for connection pooling that makes the code in the deferred thread blocking : #!/usr/bin/env python from twisted.internet import reactor,defer from twisted.internet.task import LoopingCall import time def main_loop(): print 'doing stuff in main loop.. do not block me!' def aBlockingRedisCall(x): if x<5: #all connections are busy, try later print '%s is less than 5, get a redis client later' % x x+=1 d = defer.Deferred() d.addCallback(aBlockingRedisCall) reactor.callLater(1.0,d.callback,x) return d else: print 'got a redis client; doing lookup.. this may take a while' time.sleep(10) # this is now blocking.. any ideas? d = defer.Deferred() d.addCallback(gotFinalResult) d.callback(x) return d def gotFinalResult(x): return 'final result is %s' % x def result(res): print res def aBlockingMethod(): print 'going to sleep...' time.sleep(10) print 'woke up' def main(): lc = LoopingCall(main_loop) lc.start(2) d = defer.Deferred() d.addCallback(aBlockingRedisCall) d.addCallback(result) reactor.callInThread(d.callback, 1) reactor.run() if __name__=='__main__': main() So my question is, does anyone know why my alteration causes the deferred thread to be blocking and/or can anyone suggest a better solution?