I just ran into this and found this issue myself, and using info from this thread came up with the following. I simply took my working stand alone Tornado code (copied from all the examples) and moved the actual starting code into a function. I then called the function as a threading thread. My case different as the threading call was done from my existing code where I just imported the startTornado and stopTornado routines.
The suggestion above seemed to work great, so I figured I would supply the missing example code. I tested this code under Linux on a FC16 system (and fixed my initial type-o).
import tornado.ioloop, tornado.web
class Handler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
self.write("Hello, world")
application = tornado.web.Application([ (r"https://stackoverflow.com/", Handler) ])
def startTornado():
application.listen(8888)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
def stopTornado():
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()
if __name__ == "__main__":
import time, threading
threading.Thread(target=startTornado).start()
print "Your web server will self destruct in 2 minutes"
time.sleep(120)
stopTornado()
Hope this helps the next person.