Different behavior in run and start in Python multiprocessing - python

I am trying to start multiple processes in a Python program, using multiprocessing.Queue to share data between them.
My code is shown as follows, TestClass is the process that receives packets from a zmq socket, and feeds them into the queue. There is another process(I took it out from the code) keeps fetching messages from the queue. I also have a script running to publish messages to this zmq channel.
from multiprocessing import Process, Queue
import zmq
import time
class TestClass(Process):
def __init__(self, queue):
super(TestClass, self).__init__()
# Setting up connections
self.context = zmq.Context()
self.socket = self.context.socket(zmq.SUB)
self.socket.connect("tcp://192.168.0.6:8577")
self.socket.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, b'')
self.queue = queue
def run(self):
while True:
msg = self.socket.recv()
self.queue.put(msg)
queue = Queue()
c = TestClass(queue)
c.run()
# Do something else
If I use c.run() to start the process, it runs fine, but it is not started as a Process because it blocks the following statement.
Then I switched to c.start() to start the process, but it was stuck at the line socket.recv() and cannot get any incoming messages. Can anybody please explain this and suggest a good solution? Thanks

The issue is that you're creating the zmq socket in the parent process, but then trying to use it in the child. Something in the forking process is breaking the socket, so it's not working when you try using it. You can fix it by simply creating the socket in the child, rather than the parent. This has no negative side effects, since you're not trying to use the socket in the parent to begin with.
from multiprocessing import Process, Queue
import zmq
import time
class TestClass(Process):
def __init__(self, queue):
super(TestClass, self).__init__()
self.queue = queue
def run(self):
# Setting up connections
self.context = zmq.Context()
self.socket = self.context.socket(zmq.SUB)
self.socket.connect("tcp://192.168.0.6:8577")
self.socket.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, b'')
while True:
msg = self.socket.recv()
self.queue.put(msg)
if __name__ == "__main__":
queue = Queue()
c = TestClass(queue)
c.start() # Don't use run()
# Do something else

Related

Python: how to create a server to supervise a thread pool?

I have a thread pool that handles some tasks concurrently. Now I'd like the tasks (multiply_by_2 here) to print something before exit.
Originally, I created a lock and passed the lock to each worker thread. If a thread wants to print something, it first acquires the lock, prints its message to stdout, then releases the lock.
Now, I want to have a dedicated event-driven server thread to handle the printing. If a thread wants to print something, it just send its message to that server, via a Unix domain socket (AF_UNIX). I hope in this way, each thread's blocking time can be reduced (no need to wait for the lock) and I don't need to share a lock among worker threads. The server thread just prints whatever messages it got from clients (i.e. the worker threads) in order.
I tried for some time with Python's asyncio module (requiring Python 3.7+) but couldn't figure it out. How should I do it?
This cleaned-up template is:
# Python 3.7+
import asyncio
import multiprocessing.dummy as mp # Threading wrapped using multiprocessing API.
import os
import socket
import sys
import threading
import time
server_address = './uds_socket' # UNIX domain socket
def run_multiple_clients_until_complete(input_list):
pool = mp.Pool(8)
result_list = pool.map(multiply_by_2, input_list)
return result_list
def multiply_by_2(n):
time.sleep(0.2) # Simulates some blocking call.
message_str = "client: n = %d" % n
# TODO send message_str.encode() to server
return n * 2
# Server's callback when it gets a client connection
# If you want to change it, please do..
def client_connected_cb(
stream_reader: asyncio.StreamReader,
stream_writer: asyncio.StreamWriter) -> None:
message_str = reader.read().decode()
print(message_str)
def create_server_thread():
pass # TODO
# Let the server finish handling all connections it got, then
# stop the server and join the thread
def stop_server_and_wait_thread(thread):
pass # TODO
def work(input_list):
thread = create_server_thread()
result_list = run_multiple_clients_until_complete(input_list)
stop_server_and_wait_thread(thread)
return result_list
def main():
input_list = list(range(20))
result_list = work(input_list)
print(result_list)
if __name__ == "__main__":
sys.exit(main())
Some extra requirements:
Don't make async: run_multiple_clients_until_complete(), multiply_by_2(), main().
It would be nicer to use the SOCK_DGRAM UDP protocol instead of SOCK_STREAM TCP, but it's unnecessary.

How to implement a python thread pool to test for network connectivity?

I am trying to implement a Python (2.6.x/2.7.x) thread pool that would check for network connectivity(ping or whatever), the entire pool threads must be killed/terminated when the check is successful.
So I am thinking of creating a pool of, let's say, 10 worker threads. If any one of them is successful in pinging, the main thread should terminate all the rest.
How do I implement this?
This is not a compilable code, this is just to give you and idea how to make threads communicate..
Inter process or threads communication happens through queues or pipes and some other ways..here I'm using queues for communication.
It works like this.. I'll send ip addresses in in_queue and add response to out_queue, my main thread monitors out_queue and if it gets desired result, it marks all the threads to terminate.
Below is the pinger thread definition..
import threading
from Queue import Queue, Empty
# A thread that pings ip.
class Pinger(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, kwargs=None):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.kwargs = kwargs
self.stop_pinging = False
def run(self):
ip_queue = self.kwargs.get('in_queue')
out_queue = self.kwargs.get('out_queue')
while not self.stop_pinging:
try:
data = ip_quque.get(timeout=1)
ping_status = ping(data)
# This is pseudo code, you've to takecare of
# your own ping.
if ping_status:
out_queue.put('success')
# you can even break here if you don't want to
# continue after one success
else:
out_queue.put('failure')
if ip_queue.empty()
break
except Empty, e:
pass
Here is the main thread block..
# Create the shared queue and launch both thread pools
in_queue = Queue()
out_queue = Queue()
ip_list = ['ip1', 'ip2', '....']
# This is to add all the ips to the queue or you can
# customize to add through some producer way.
for ip in ip_list:
in_queue.put(ip)
pingerer_pool = []
for i in xrange(1, 10):
pingerer_worker = Pinger(kwargs={'in_queue': in_queue, 'out_queue': out_queue}, name=str(i))
pingerer_pool.append(pinger_worker)
pingerer_worker.start()
while 1:
if out_queue.get() == 'success':
for pinger in pinger_pool:
pinger_worker.stop_pinging = True
break
Note: This is a pseudo code, you should make this workable as you like.

Python: return result from a thread

I'm trying to multithread my Python application. This is how i thought the application would work:
A list of ipv4 addresses is created by the user
For each ipv4 address, the application establishes an SSH connection and logs in. This part would benefit from multithreading since each device takes about 10 seconds to complete. The ssh bit is all handled by my ConfDumper class.
in each thread, a bit of data is fetched from the network device and should be returned to the main thread (where there is a list of devices)
Once all threads are done, a result is presented.
Being new to Python and having no experience with multithreading, I've tried something like this:
import threading
import confDumper
class MyThread (threading.Thread):
device = None
# A device object is sent as agument
def __init__(self, device):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.device = device
def run(self):
print "Starting scan..."
self.sshscan()
print "Exiting thread"
def sshscan(self):
s = confDumper.ConfDumper(self.device.mgmt_ip, self.device.username, self.device.password, self.device.enable_password)
t = s.getConf()
if t:
# We got the conf, return it to the main thread, somehow...
It seems to be working when I debug the code and step though the lines one by one, but once the thread is closed all results from the thread are lost. How do I return the result to the main thread?
You can use a Queue:
import Queue
import threading
import random
import time
class Worker(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, queue):
super(Worker, self).__init__()
self._queue = queue
def run(self):
time.sleep(5.0 * random.random())
self._queue.put(str(self))
queue = Queue.Queue()
workers = [Worker(queue) for _ in xrange(10)]
for worker in workers:
worker.start()
for worker in workers:
worker.join()
while queue.qsize():
print queue.get()
This was much easier than I thought. As far as I can see you don't have to return anything, the object sent to the thread is the same as the source.

Can pygame events be handled in select.select input list?

The documentation for python's select.select says:
Note that on Windows, it only works for sockets; on other operating
systems, it also works for other file types (in particular, on Unix,
it works on pipes).
My group is developing a simplistic multiplayer game using pygame and sockets. (We are not using Twisted or zeromq or any similar libraries; this being the only constraint).
Now, for the game design; we want the player to send data to the server when a key event occurs in the pygame screen. The client/player side's socket will otherwise be hooked to server and listen for changes occurring on other players' side. For this task, I'd need the pygame and socket to work parallely. I was recommended to use select module from several users on #python.
Can I do something like:
inp = [self.sock, pygame.event.get]
out = [self.server]
i, o, x = select.select( inp, out, [] )
If not, what should be the way to go?
You could use threads for this task. Is it necessary to process server messages and pygame events in series (not concurrently)? If so, you could do this:
class SocketListener(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, sock, queue):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.daemon = True
self.socket = sock
self.queue = queue
def run(self):
while True:
msg = self.socket.recv()
self.queue.put(msg)
class PygameHandler(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, queue):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.queue = queue
self.daemon = True
def run(self):
while True:
self.queue.put(pygame.event.wait())
queue = Queue.Queue()
PygameHandler(queue).start()
SocketListener(queue).start()
while True:
event = queue.get()
"""Process the event()"""
If not, you could process the events inside the run methods of the PygameHandler and SocketListener classes.

Need a thread-safe asynchronous message queue

I'm looking for a Python class (preferably part of the standard language, rather than a 3rd party library) to manage asynchronous 'broadcast style' messaging.
I will have one thread which puts messages on the queue (the 'putMessageOnQueue' method must not block) and then multiple other threads which will all be waiting for messages, having presumably called some blocking 'waitForMessage' function. When a message is placed on the queue I want each of the waiting threads to get its own copy of the message.
I've looked at the built-in Queue class, but I don't think this is suitable because consuming messages seems to involve removing them from the queue, so only 1 client thread would see each one.
This seems like it should be a common use-case, can anyone recommend a solution?
I think the typical approach to this is to use a separate message queue for each thread, and push the message onto every queue which has previously registered an interest in receiving such messages.
Something like this ought to work, but it's untested code...
from time import sleep
from threading import Thread
from Queue import Queue
class DispatcherThread(Thread):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(DispatcherThread, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.interested_threads = []
def run(self):
while 1:
if some_condition:
self.dispatch_message(some_message)
else:
sleep(0.1)
def register_interest(self, thread):
self.interested_threads.append(thread)
def dispatch_message(self, message):
for thread in self.interested_threads:
thread.put_message(message)
class WorkerThread(Thread):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(WorkerThread, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.queue = Queue()
def run(self):
# Tell the dispatcher thread we want messages
dispatcher_thread.register_interest(self)
while 1:
# Wait for next message
message = self.queue.get()
# Process message
# ...
def put_message(self, message):
self.queue.put(message)
dispatcher_thread = DispatcherThread()
dispatcher_thread.start()
worker_threads = []
for i in range(10):
worker_thread = WorkerThread()
worker_thread.start()
worker_threads.append(worker_thread)
dispatcher_thread.join()
I think this is a more straight forward example (taken from the Queue example in Python Lib )
from threading import Thread
from Queue import Queue
num_worker_threads = 2
def worker():
while True:
item = q.get()
do_work(item)
q.task_done()
q = Queue()
for i in range(num_worker_threads):
t = Thread(target=worker)
t.daemon = True
t.start()
for item in source():
q.put(item)
q.join() # block until all tasks are done

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