I'm working with a django application hosted on heroku with redistogo addon:nano pack. I'm using rq, to execute tasks in the background - the tasks are initiated by online users. I've a constraint on increasing number of connections, limited resources I'm afraid.
I'm currently having a single worker running over 'n' number of queues. Each queue uses an instance of connection from the connection pool to handle 'n' different types of task. For instance, lets say if 4 users initiate same type of task, I would like to have my main worker create child processes dynamically, to handle it. Is there a way to achieve required multiprocessing and concurrency?
I tried with multiprocessing module, initially without introducing Lock(); but that exposes and overwrites user passed data to the initiating function, with the previous request data. After applying locks, it restricts second user to initiate the requests by returning a server error - 500
github link #1: Looks like the team is working on the PR; not yet released though!
github link #2: This post helps to explain creating more workers at runtime.
This solution however also overrides the data. The new request is again processed with the previous requests data.
Let me know if you need to see some code. I'll try to post a minimal reproducible snippet.
Any thoughts/suggestions/guidelines?
Did you get a chance to try AutoWorker?
Spawn RQ Workers automatically.
from autoworker import AutoWorker
aw = AutoWorker(queue='high', max_procs=6)
aw.work()
It makes use of multiprocessing with StrictRedis from redis module and following imports from rq
from rq.contrib.legacy import cleanup_ghosts
from rq.queue import Queue
from rq.worker import Worker, WorkerStatus
After looking under the hood, I realised Worker class is already implementing multiprocessing.
The work function internally calls execute_job(job, queue) which in turn as quoted in the module
Spawns a work horse to perform the actual work and passes it a job.
The worker will wait for the work horse and make sure it executes within the given timeout bounds,
or will end the work horse with SIGALRM.
The execute_job() funtion makes a call to fork_work_horse(job, queue) implicitly which spawns a work horse to perform the actual work and passes it a job as per the following logic:
def fork_work_horse(self, job, queue):
child_pid = os.fork()
os.environ['RQ_WORKER_ID'] = self.name
os.environ['RQ_JOB_ID'] = job.id
if child_pid == 0:
self.main_work_horse(job, queue)
else:
self._horse_pid = child_pid
self.procline('Forked {0} at {1}'.format(child_pid, time.time()))
The main_work_horse makes an internal call to perform_job(job, queue) which makes a few other calls to actually perform the job.
All the steps about The Worker Lifecycle mentioned over rq's official documentation page are taken care within these calls.
It's not the multiprocessing I was expecting, but I guess they have a way of doing things. However my original post is still not answered with this, also I'm still not sure about concurrency..
The documentation there still needs to be worked upon, since it hardly covers the true essence of this library!
Related
I have a Django application that uses large data structures in-memory (due to performance constraints). This wouldn't be a problem, but I'm using Heroku, where if the python web process takes more than 30s to start, it will be stopped as it's considered a timeout error. Because of the problem aforementioned, I've used a daemon process(worker in Heroku) to handle the construction of the data structures and Redis to handle the message passing between processes.
When the worker finishes(approx 1 minute), it stores the data structures(50Mb or so) in Redis.
And now comes the crux of the matter...Django follows the request/response paradigm and it's synchronised. This implies a Django view should exist to handle the callback from the worker announcing it's done. Even if I use something fancier like a pub/sub from Redis, I'm still forced to evaluate the queue populated by a publisher in a view.
How can I circumvent the necessity of using a Django view? Isn't there an async way of doing this?
Below is the solution where I use a pub/sub inside a view. This seems bad, but I can't think of another way.
views.py
...
# data_handler can enqueue tasks on the default queue
data_handler = DataHandler()
strict_redis = redis.from_url(settings.DEFAULT_QUEUE)
pub_sub = strict_redis.pubsub()
# this puts the job of constructing the large data structures
# on the default queue so a worker can pick it up. Being async,
# it returns with an empty set of data structures.
data_structures = data_handler.start()
pub_sub.subscribe(settings.FINISHED_DATA_STRUCTURES_CHANNEL)
#require_http_methods(['POST'])
def store_and_fetch(request):
user_data = json.load(request.body.decode('utf8'))
message = pub_sub.get_message()
if message:
command = message['data'] if 'data' in message else ''
if command == settings.FINISHED_DATA_STRUCTURES_INIT.encode('utf-8'):
# this takes the data from redis and updates data_structures
data_handler.update(data_structures)
return HttpResponse(compute_response(user_data, data_structures))
Update: After working for multiple months with this, I can now say it's definitely better(and wiser) NOT to fiddle with Django's request/response cycle. There are things like Django RQ Scheduler, or Celery that can do async tasks just fine. If you want to update the main web process after some repeatable job completed, it's simpler to use something like python requests package, sending a POST to the web process from the worker that did the scheduled job. In this way we don't circumvent Django's mechanisms, and more importantly, it's simpler to do overall.
Regarding the Heroku constraints I mentioned at the beginning of the post. At the moment I wrote this question I was quite a newbie with heroku and didn't know much about the release phase. In the release phase we can set up all the complex logic we need for the main process. Thus, at the end of the release phase, we simply need to notify the web process, in the manner I've described above and use some distributed memory buffer (even Redis will work just fine).
I have created a module that does some heavy computations, and returns some data to be stored in a nosqldatabase. The computation process is started via a post request in my flask application. The flask function will execute the cumputation code and after the code and then the returned results will be stored in db. I was thinking of celery. But I am wondering and haven't found any clear info on that if it would be possible to use python trheading E.g
from mysci_module import heavy_compute
#route('/initiate_task/', methods=['POST',])
def run_computation():
import thread
thread.start_new_thread(heavy_compute, post_data)
return reponse
Its very abstract I know. The only problem I see in this method is that my function will have to know and be responsible in storing data in the database, so It is not very independant on the database used. Correct? Why is Celery a better (is it really?) than the method above?
Since CPython is restricted from true concurrency using threads by the GIL, all computations will infact happen serially. Instead you could use the python multiprocessing module and create a pool of processes to complete your heavy computation task.
There are a few microframeworks such as twisted klein apart from celery that can also help achieve that concurrency and independence that you're looking for. They aren't necessarily better, but are available for those who don't want to get their hands messy with various issues that are likely to come up when one gets into synchronizing flask and the actual business logic, especially when response is based on that activity.
I would suggest the following method to start a thread for the long procedure first. Then leave Flask to communicate with the procedure time by time upon your requirements:
from mysci_module import heavy_compute
import thread
thread.start_new_thread(heavy_compute, post_data)
#route('/initiate_task/', methods=['POST',])
def check_computation():
response = heave_compute.status
return response
The best part of this method is to make sure you have a callable thread in the background all the time while it's possible to get the necessary result even passing some parameters to the task.
If this is an idiotic question, I apologize and will go hide my head in shame, but:
I'm using rq to queue jobs in Python. I want it to work like this:
Job A starts. Job A grabs data via web API and stores it.
Job A runs.
Job A completes.
Upon completion of A, job B starts. Job B checks each record stored by job A and adds some additional response data.
Upon completion of job B, user gets a happy e-mail saying their report's ready.
My code so far:
redis_conn = Redis()
use_connection(redis_conn)
q = Queue('normal', connection=redis_conn) # this is terrible, I know - fixing later
w = Worker(q)
job = q.enqueue(getlinksmod.lsGet, theURL,total,domainid)
w.work()
I assumed my best solution was to have 2 workers, one for job A and one for B. The job B worker could monitor job A and, when job A was done, get started on job B.
What I can't figure out to save my life is how I get one worker to monitor the status of another. I can grab the job ID from job A with job.id. I can grab the worker name with w.name. But haven't the foggiest as to how I pass any of that information to the other worker.
Or, is there a much simpler way to do this that I'm totally missing?
Update januari 2015, this pull request is now merged, and the parameter is renamed to depends_on, ie:
second_job = q.enqueue(email_customer, depends_on=first_job)
The original post left intact for people running older versions and such:
I have submitted a pull request (https://github.com/nvie/rq/pull/207) to handle job dependencies in RQ. When this pull request gets merged in, you'll be able to do:
def generate_report():
pass
def email_customer():
pass
first_job = q.enqueue(generate_report)
second_job = q.enqueue(email_customer, after=first_job)
# In the second enqueue call, job is created,
# but only moved into queue after first_job finishes
For now, I suggest writing a wrapper function to sequentially run your jobs. For example:
def generate_report():
pass
def email_customer():
pass
def generate_report_and_email():
generate_report()
email_customer() # You can also enqueue this function, if you really want to
# Somewhere else
q.enqueue(generate_report_and_email)
From this page on the rq docs, it looks like each job object has a result attribute, callable by job.result, which you can check. If the job hasn't finished, it'll be None, but if you ensure that your job returns some value (even just "Done"), then you can have your other worker check the result of the first job and then begin working only when job.result has a value, meaning the first worker was completed.
You are probably too deep into your project to switch, but if not, take a look at Twisted. http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ I am using it right now for a project that hits APIs, scrapes web content, etc. It runs multiple jobs in parallel, as well as organizing certain jobs in order, so Job B doesn't execute until Job A is done.
This is the best tutorial for learning Twisted if you want to attempt. http://krondo.com/?page_id=1327
Combine the things that job A and job B do in one function, and then use e.g. multiprocessing.Pool (it's map_async method) to farm that out over different processes.
I'm not familiar with rq, but multiprocessing is a part of the standard library. By default it uses as many processes as your CPU has cores, which in my experience is usually enough to saturate the machine.
I'm using deferred to put tasks in the default queue in a AppEngine app similar to this approach.
Im naming the task with a timestamp that changes every 5 second. During that time a lot of calls are made to the queue with the same name resulting in a TaskAlreadyExistsError which is fine. The problem is when I check the quotas the "Task Queue API Calls" are increasing for every call made, not only those who actually are put in the queue.
I mean if you look at the quota: Task Queue API Calls: 34,017 of 100,000 and compare to the actual queue calls: /_ah/queue/deferred - 2.49K
Here is the code that handles the queue:
try:
deferred.defer(function_call, params, _name=task_name, _countdown=int(interval/2))
except (taskqueue.TaskAlreadyExistsError, taskqueue.TombstonedTaskError):
pass
I suppose that is the way it works. Is there a good way to solve the problem with the quota? Can I use memcache to store the task_name and check if the task has been added besides the above try/catch? Or is there a way to check if the task already exists without using Task Queue Api Calls?
Thanks for pointing out that this is the case, because I didn't realise, but the same problem must be affecting me.
As far as I can see yeah, throwing something into memcache comprised of the taskname should work fine, and then if you want to reduce those hits on memcache you can store the flag locally also within the instance.
The "good way" to solve the quota problem is eliminating destined-to-fail calls to Task Queue API.
_name you are using changes every 5 seconds which might not be a bottleneck if you increase the execution rate of your Task Queue. But you also add Tasks using _countdown.
I am using Python 2.6 and the multiprocessing module for multi-threading. Now I would like to have a synchronized dict (where the only atomic operation I really need is the += operator on a value).
Should I wrap the dict with a multiprocessing.sharedctypes.synchronized() call? Or is another way the way to go?
Intro
There seems to be a lot of arm-chair suggestions and no working examples. None of the answers listed here even suggest using multiprocessing and this is quite a bit disappointing and disturbing. As python lovers we should support our built-in libraries, and while parallel processing and synchronization is never a trivial matter, I believe it can be made trivial with proper design. This is becoming extremely important in modern multi-core architectures and cannot be stressed enough! That said, I am far from satisfied with the multiprocessing library, as it is still in its infancy stages with quite a few pitfalls, bugs, and being geared towards functional programming (which I detest). Currently I still prefer the Pyro module (which is way ahead of its time) over multiprocessing due to multiprocessing's severe limitation in being unable to share newly created objects while the server is running. The "register" class-method of the manager objects will only actually register an object BEFORE the manager (or its server) is started. Enough chatter, more code:
Server.py
from multiprocessing.managers import SyncManager
class MyManager(SyncManager):
pass
syncdict = {}
def get_dict():
return syncdict
if __name__ == "__main__":
MyManager.register("syncdict", get_dict)
manager = MyManager(("127.0.0.1", 5000), authkey="password")
manager.start()
raw_input("Press any key to kill server".center(50, "-"))
manager.shutdown()
In the above code example, Server.py makes use of multiprocessing's SyncManager which can supply synchronized shared objects. This code will not work running in the interpreter because the multiprocessing library is quite touchy on how to find the "callable" for each registered object. Running Server.py will start a customized SyncManager that shares the syncdict dictionary for use of multiple processes and can be connected to clients either on the same machine, or if run on an IP address other than loopback, other machines. In this case the server is run on loopback (127.0.0.1) on port 5000. Using the authkey parameter uses secure connections when manipulating syncdict. When any key is pressed the manager is shutdown.
Client.py
from multiprocessing.managers import SyncManager
import sys, time
class MyManager(SyncManager):
pass
MyManager.register("syncdict")
if __name__ == "__main__":
manager = MyManager(("127.0.0.1", 5000), authkey="password")
manager.connect()
syncdict = manager.syncdict()
print "dict = %s" % (dir(syncdict))
key = raw_input("Enter key to update: ")
inc = float(raw_input("Enter increment: "))
sleep = float(raw_input("Enter sleep time (sec): "))
try:
#if the key doesn't exist create it
if not syncdict.has_key(key):
syncdict.update([(key, 0)])
#increment key value every sleep seconds
#then print syncdict
while True:
syncdict.update([(key, syncdict.get(key) + inc)])
time.sleep(sleep)
print "%s" % (syncdict)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print "Killed client"
The client must also create a customized SyncManager, registering "syncdict", this time without passing in a callable to retrieve the shared dict. It then uses the customized SycnManager to connect using the loopback IP address (127.0.0.1) on port 5000 and an authkey establishing a secure connection to the manager started in Server.py. It retrieves the shared dict syncdict by calling the registered callable on the manager. It prompts the user for the following:
The key in syncdict to operate on
The amount to increment the value accessed by the key every cycle
The amount of time to sleep per cycle in seconds
The client then checks to see if the key exists. If it doesn't it creates the key on the syncdict. The client then enters an "endless" loop where it updates the key's value by the increment, sleeps the amount specified, and prints the syncdict only to repeat this process until a KeyboardInterrupt occurs (Ctrl+C).
Annoying problems
The Manager's register methods MUST be called before the manager is started otherwise you will get exceptions even though a dir call on the Manager will reveal that it indeed does have the method that was registered.
All manipulations of the dict must be done with methods and not dict assignments (syncdict["blast"] = 2 will fail miserably because of the way multiprocessing shares custom objects)
Using SyncManager's dict method would alleviate annoying problem #2 except that annoying problem #1 prevents the proxy returned by SyncManager.dict() being registered and shared. (SyncManager.dict() can only be called AFTER the manager is started, and register will only work BEFORE the manager is started so SyncManager.dict() is only useful when doing functional programming and passing the proxy to Processes as an argument like the doc examples do)
The server AND the client both have to register even though intuitively it would seem like the client would just be able to figure it out after connecting to the manager (Please add this to your wish-list multiprocessing developers)
Closing
I hope you enjoyed this quite thorough and slightly time-consuming answer as much as I have. I was having a great deal of trouble getting straight in my mind why I was struggling so much with the multiprocessing module where Pyro makes it a breeze and now thanks to this answer I have hit the nail on the head. I hope this is useful to the python community on how to improve the multiprocessing module as I do believe it has a great deal of promise but in its infancy falls short of what is possible. Despite the annoying problems described I think this is still quite a viable alternative and is pretty simple. You could also use SyncManager.dict() and pass it to Processes as an argument the way the docs show and it would probably be an even simpler solution depending on your requirements it just feels unnatural to me.
I would dedicate a separate process to maintaining the "shared dict": just use e.g. xmlrpclib to make that tiny amount of code available to the other processes, exposing via xmlrpclib e.g. a function taking key, increment to perform the increment and one taking just the key and returning the value, with semantic details (is there a default value for missing keys, etc, etc) depending on your app's needs.
Then you can use any approach you like to implement the shared-dict dedicated process: all the way from a single-threaded server with a simple dict in memory, to a simple sqlite DB, etc, etc. I suggest you start with code "as simple as you can get away with" (depending on whether you need a persistent shared dict, or persistence is not necessary to you), then measure and optimize as and if needed.
In response to an appropriate solution to the concurrent-write issue. I did very quick research and found that this article is suggesting a lock/semaphore solution. (http://effbot.org/zone/thread-synchronization.htm)
While the example isn't specificity on a dictionary, I'm pretty sure you could code a class-based wrapper object to help you work with dictionaries based on this idea.
If I had a requirement to implement something like this in a thread safe manner, I'd probably use the Python Semaphore solution. (Assuming my earlier merge technique wouldn't work.) I believe that semaphores generally slow down thread efficiencies due to their blocking nature.
From the site:
A semaphore is a more advanced lock mechanism. A semaphore has an internal counter rather than a lock flag, and it only blocks if more than a given number of threads have attempted to hold the semaphore. Depending on how the semaphore is initialized, this allows multiple threads to access the same code section simultaneously.
semaphore = threading.BoundedSemaphore()
semaphore.acquire() # decrements the counter
... access the shared resource; work with dictionary, add item or whatever.
semaphore.release() # increments the counter
Is there a reason that the dictionary needs to be shared in the first place? Could you have each thread maintain their own instance of a dictionary and either merge at the end of the thread processing or periodically use a call-back to merge copies of the individual thread dictionaries together?
I don't know exactly what you are doing, so keep in my that my written plan may not work verbatim. What I'm suggesting is more of a high-level design idea.