Set delay between tasks in group in Celery - python

I have a python app where user can initiate a certain task.
The whole purpose of a task is too execute a given number of POST/GET requests with a particular interval to a given URL.
So user gives N - number of requests, V - number of requests per second.
How is it better to design such a task taking into account that due to a I/O latency the actual r/s speed could bigger or smaller.
First of all I decided to use Celery with Eventlet because otherwise I would need dozen of works which is not acceptable.
My naive approach:
Client starts a task using task.delay()
Inside task I do something like this:
#task
def task(number_of_requests, time_period):
for _ in range(number_of_requests):
start = time.time()
params_for_concrete_subtask = ...
# .... do some IO with monkey_patched eventlet requests library
elapsed = (time.time() - start)
# If we completed this subtask to fast
if elapsed < time_period / number_of_requests:
eventlet.sleep(time_period / number_of_requests)
A working example is here.
if we are too fast we try to wait to keep the desired speed. If we are too slow it's ok from client's prospective. We do not violate requests/second requirement. But will this resume correctly if I restart Celery?
I think this should work but I thought there is a better way.
In Celery I can define a task with a particular rate limit which will almost match my needs guarantee. So I could use Celery group feature and write:
#task(rate_limit=...)
def task(...):
#
task_executor = task.s(number_of_requests, time_period)
group(task_executor(params_for_concrete_task) for params_for_concrete_task in ...).delay()
But here I hardcode the the rate_limit which is dynamic and I do not see a way of changing it. I saw an example:
task.s(....).set(... params ...)
But I tried to pass rate_limit to the set method it it did not work.
Another maybe a bettre idea was to use Celery's periodic task scheduler. With the default implementation periods and tasks to be executed periodically is fixed.
I need to be able to dynamically create tasks, which run periodically a given number of times with a specific rate limit. Maybe I need to run my own Scheduler which will take tasks from DB? But I do not see any documentation around this.
Another approach was to try to use a chain function, but I could not figure out is there a delay between tasks parameter.

If you want to adjust the rate_limit dynamically you can do it using the following code. It is also creating the chain() at runtime.
Run this you will see that we successfully override the rate_limit of 5/sec to 0.5/sec.
test_tasks.py
from celery import Celery, signature, chain
import datetime as dt
app = Celery('test_tasks')
app.config_from_object('celery_config')
#app.task(bind=True, rate_limit=5)
def test_1(self):
print dt.datetime.now()
app.control.broadcast('rate_limit',
arguments={'task_name': 'test_tasks.test_1',
'rate_limit': 0.5})
test_task = signature('test_tasks.test_1').set(immutable=True)
l = [test_task] * 100
chain = chain(*l)
res = chain()
I also tried to override the attribute from within the class, but IMO the rate_limit is set when the task is registered by the worker, that is why the .set() has no effects. I'm speculating here, one would have to check the source code.
Solution 2
Implement your own waiting mechanism using the end time of the previous call, in the chain the return of the function is passed to the next one.
So it would look like this:
from celery import Celery, signature, chain
import datetime as dt
import time
app = Celery('test_tasks')
app.config_from_object('celery_config')
#app.task(bind=True)
def test_1(self, prev_endtime=dt.datetime.now(), wait_seconds=5):
wait = dt.timedelta(seconds=wait_seconds)
print dt.datetime.now() - prev_endtime
wait = wait - (dt.datetime.now() - prev_endtime)
wait = wait.seconds
print wait
time.sleep(max(0, wait))
now = dt.datetime.now()
print now
return now
#app.control.rate_limit('test_tasks.test_1', '0.5')
test_task = signature('test_tasks.test_1')
l = [test_task] * 100
chain = chain(*l)
res = chain()
I think this is actually more reliable than the broadcast.

Related

Tracking progress of a celery chord task with tqdm? (Python)

Is there a way to track the progress of a chord, preferably in a tqdm bar?
For example if we take the documentation exemple, we would create this file:
#proj/tasks.py
#app.task
def add(x, y):
return x + y
#app.task
def tsum(numbers):
return sum(numbers)
and then run this script:
from celery import chord
from proj.tasks import add, tsum
chord(add.s(i, i)
for i in range(100))(tsum.s()).get()
How could we track the progression on the chord?
We cannot use update_state since the chord() object is not a function.
We cannot use collect() since chord()(callback) blocks the script until the results are ready.
Ideally I would envision something like this custom tqdm subclass for Dask, however I've been unable to find a similar solution.
Any help or hint much appreciated!
So I found a way around it.
First, chord()(callback) doesn't actually block the script, only the .get() part does. It just might take a long time to publish all tasks to the broker. Luckily, there's a simple way to track this publishing process through signals. We can create a progress bar before the publishing begins and modify the example handler from the documentation to update it:
from tqdm import tqdm
from celery.signals import after_task_publish
publish_pbar = tqdm(total=100, desc="Publishing tasks")
#after_task_publish.connect(sender='tasks.add')
def task_sent_handler(sender=None, headers=None, body=None, **kwargs):
publish_pbar.update(1)
c = chord(add.s(i, i)
for i in range(100))(tsum.s())
# The script will resume once all tasks are published so close the pbar
publish_pbar.close()
However this only works for publishing tasks since this signal is executed in the signal that sent the task. The task_success signal is executed in the worker process, so this trick can only be used in the worker log (to the best of my understanding).
So to track progress once all tasks have been published and the script resumes, I turned to worker stats from app.control.inspect().stats(). This returns a dict with various stats, among which are the completed tasks. Here's my implementation:
tasks_pbar = tqdm(total=100, desc="Executing tasks")
previous_total = 0
current_total = 0
while current_total<100:
current_total = 0
for key in app.control.inspect().stats():
current_total += app.control.inspect().stats()[key]['total']['tasks.add']
if current_total > previous_total:
tasks_pbar.update(current_total-previous_total)
previous_total = current_total
results = c.get()
tasks_pbar.close()
Finally, I think it might be necessary to give names to the tasks, both for filtering by the signal handler and for the stats() dict, so do not forget to add this to your tasks:
#proj/tasks.py
#app.task(name='tasks.add')
def add(x, y):
return x + y
If someone can find a better solution, please do share!

Can Celery pass a Status Update to a non-Blocking Caller?

I am using Celery to asynchronously perform a group of operations. There are a lot of these operations and each may take a long time, so rather than send the results back in the return value of the Celery worker function, I'd like to send them back one at a time as custom state updates. That way the caller can implement a progress bar with a change state callback, and the return value of the worker function can be of constant size rather than linear in the number of operations.
Here is a simple example in which I use the Celery worker function add_pairs_of_numbers to add a list of pairs of numbers, sending back a custom status update for every added pair.
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Run worker with:
celery -A tasks worker --loglevel=info
"""
from celery import Celery
app = Celery("tasks", broker="pyamqp://guest#localhost//", backend="rpc://")
#app.task(bind=True)
def add_pairs_of_numbers(self, pairs):
for x, y in pairs:
self.update_state(state="SUM", meta={"x":x, "y":y, "x+y":x+y})
return len(pairs)
def handle_message(message):
if message["status"] == "SUM":
x = message["result"]["x"]
y = message["result"]["y"]
print(f"Message: {x} + {y} = {x+y}")
def non_looping(*pairs):
task = add_pairs_of_numbers.delay(pairs)
result = task.get(on_message=handle_message)
print(result)
def looping(*pairs):
task = add_pairs_of_numbers.delay(pairs)
print(task)
while True:
pass
if __name__ == "__main__":
import sys
if sys.argv[1:] and sys.argv[1] == "looping":
looping((3,4), (2,7), (5,5))
else:
non_looping((3,4), (2,7), (5,5))
If you run just ./tasks it executes the non_looping function. This does the standard Celery thing: makes a delayed call to the worker function and then uses get to wait for the result. A handle_message callback function prints each message, and the number of pairs added is returned as the result. This is what I want.
$ ./task.py
Message: 3 + 4 = 7
Message: 2 + 7 = 9
Message: 5 + 5 = 10
3
Though the non-looping scenario is sufficient for this simple example, the real world task I'm trying to accomplish is processing a batch of files instead of adding pairs of numbers. Furthermore the client is a Flask REST API and therefore cannot contain any blocking get calls. In the script above I simulate this constraint with the looping function. This function starts the asynchronous Celery task, but does not wait for a response. (The infinite while loop that follows simulates the web server continuing to run and handle other requests.)
If you run the script with the argument "looping" it runs this code path. Here it immediately prints the Celery task ID then drops into the infinite loop.
$ ./tasks.py looping
a39c54d3-2946-4f4e-a465-4cc3adc6cbe5
The Celery worker logs show that the add operations are performed, but the caller doesn't define a callback function, so it never gets the results.
(I realize that this particular example is embarrassingly parallel, so I could use chunks to divide this up into multiple tasks. However, in my non-simplified real-world case I have tasks that cannot be parallelized.)
What I want is to be able to specify a callback in the looping scenario. Something like this.
def looping(*pairs):
task = add_pairs_of_numbers.delay(pairs, callback=handle_message) # There is no such callback.
print(task)
while True:
pass
In the Celery documentation and all the examples I can find online (for example this), there is no way to define a callback function as part of the delay call or its apply_async equivalent. You can only specify one as part of a get callback. That's making me think this is an intentional design decision.
In my REST API scenario I can work around this by having the Celery worker process send a "status update" back to the Flask server in the form of an HTTP post, but this seems weird because I'm starting to replicate messaging logic in HTTP that already exists in Celery.
Is there any way to write my looping scenario so that the caller receives callbacks without making a blocking call, or is that explicitly forbidden in Celery?
It's a pattern that is not supported by celery although you can (somewhat) trick it out by posting custom state updates to your task as described here.
Use update_state() to update a task’s state:.
def upload_files(self, filenames):
for i, file in enumerate(filenames):
if not self.request.called_directly:
self.update_state(state='PROGRESS',
meta={'current': i, 'total': len(filenames)})```
The reason that celery does not support such a pattern is that task producers (callers) are strongly decoupled from the task consumers (workers) with the only communications between the two being the broker to support communication from producers to consumers and the result backend supporting communications from consumers to producers. The closest you can get currently is with polling a task state or writing a custom result backend that will allow you to post events either via AMP RPC or redis subscriptions.

Python/Django: Schedule task in realtime after every X duration (secs/mins/hours?)

I want to execute some task (function) within my Django application at a specified duration from when a call is made to that. Something like:
... some code
async_run_func(time_interval=15_mins) # Async call. Code within the function
# should be executed after 15 mins.
... some more code
async_run_func is to be executed after some custom interval.
What is the correct approach to achieve this? One way is to create a separate thread and sleep it for time_duration period. But that will result into too many threads on the server. Also, in case the gunicorn process is restarted, the state will be lost. I want the information to persistent. So, I do not want to go with this approach. Currently I am using celery for executing long async and periodic tasks. But celery do not allow option to run a function single time after the specified duration.
It will be great if there is anyway to do it on distributed system. For example, function will be call from one system but the code to be executed on other system (use of queue like RabbitMQ is fine with me). Else, I can also go for executing it on the same machine. Any suggestion?
Celery has the option of enqueuing at a specific time:
your_async_function.apply_async(args=(your, args, tuple),
kwargs={your: kwargs},
countdown=15 * 60)
Or use the subtask syntax, to curry all args and then delay
your_async_function.s(your, args, tuple, your: kwargs).delay(countdown=15 * 60)
If the function has no args, you can skip them and do directly
your_async_function.delay(countdown=15 * 60)
What about using sched module? Simple and efficient.
import sched, time
sc = sched.scheduler(time.time, time.sleep)
sc.enter(15, 1, async_run_func, ())
sc.run
ETA and Countdown are options to perform this using django-celery.
From the document:
The ETA (estimated time of arrival) lets you set a specific date and time that is the earliest time at which your task will be executed. countdown is a shortcut to set ETA by seconds into the future.
For example:
>>> result = add.apply_async((2, 2), countdown=3)
>>> result.get() # this takes at least 3 seconds to return
20
The task is guaranteed to be executed at some time after the specified date and time, but not necessarily at that exact time. Possible reasons for broken deadlines may include many items waiting in the queue, or heavy network latency. To make sure your tasks are executed in a timely manner you should monitor the queue for congestion.
While countdown is an integer, eta must be a datetime object, specifying an exact date and time (including millisecond precision, and timezone information):
>>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
>>> tomorrow = datetime.utcnow() + timedelta(days=1)
>>> add.apply_async((2, 2), eta=tomorrow)

Reporting yielded results of long-running Celery task

Problem
I've segmented a long-running task into logical subtasks, so I can report the results of each subtask as it completes. However, I'm trying to report the results of a task that will effectively never complete (instead yielding values as it goes), and am struggling to do so with my existing solution.
Background
I'm building a web interface to some Python programs I've written. Users can submit jobs through web forms, then check back to see the job's progress.
Let's say I have two functions, each accessed via separate forms:
med_func: Takes ~1 minute to execute, results are passed off to render(), which produces additional data.
long_func: Returns a generator. Each yield takes on the order of 30 minutes, and should be reported to the user. There are so many yields, we can consider this iterator as infinite (terminating only when revoked).
Code, current implementation
With med_func, I report results as follows:
On form submission, I save an AsyncResult to a Django session:
task_result = med_func.apply_async([form], link=render.s())
request.session["task_result"] = task_result
The Django view for the results page accesses this AsyncResult. When a task has completed, results are saved into an object that is passed as context to a Django template.
def results(request):
""" Serve (possibly incomplete) results of a session's latest run. """
session = request.session
try: # Load most recent task
task_result = session["task_result"]
except KeyError: # Already cleared, or doesn't exist
if "results" not in session:
session["status"] = "No job submitted"
else: # Extract data from Asynchronous Tasks
session["status"] = task_result.status
if task_result.ready():
session["results"] = task_result.get()
render_task = task_result.children[0]
# Decorate with rendering results
session["render_status"] = render_task.status
if render_task.ready():
session["results"].render_output = render_task.get()
del(request.session["task_result"]) # Don't need any more
return render_to_response('results.html', request.session)
This solution only works when the function actually terminates. I can't chain together logical subtasks of long_func, because there are an unknown number of yields (each iteration of long_func's loop may not produce a result).
Question
Is there any sensible way to access yielded objects from an extremely long-running Celery task, so that they can be displayed before the generator is exhausted?
In order for Celery to know what the current state of the task is, it sets some metadata in whatever result backend you have. You can piggy-back on that to store other kinds of metadata.
def yielder():
for i in range(2**100):
yield i
#task
def report_progress():
for progress in yielder():
# set current progress on the task
report_progress.backend.mark_as_started(
report_progress.request.id,
progress=progress)
def view_function(request):
task_id = request.session['task_id']
task = AsyncResult(task_id)
progress = task.info['progress']
# do something with your current progress
I wouldn't throw a ton of data in there, but it works well for tracking the progress of a long-running task.
Paul's answer is great. As an alternative to using mark_as_started you can use Task's update_state method. They ultimately do the same thing, but the name "update_state" is a little more appropriate for what you're trying to do. You can optionally define a custom state that indicates your task is in progress (I've named my custom state 'PROGRESS'):
def yielder():
for i in range(2**100):
yield i
#task
def report_progress():
for progress in yielder():
# set current progress on the task
report_progress.update_state(state='PROGRESS', meta={'progress': progress})
def view_function(request):
task_id = request.session['task_id']
task = AsyncResult(task_id)
progress = task.info['progress']
# do something with your current progress
Celery part:
def long_func(*args, **kwargs):
i = 0
while True:
yield i
do_something_here(*args, **kwargs)
i += 1
#task()
def test_yield_task(task_id=None, **kwargs):
the_progress = 0
for the_progress in long_func(**kwargs):
cache.set('celery-task-%s' % task_id, the_progress)
Webclient side, starting task:
r = test_yield_task.apply_async()
request.session['task_id'] = r.task_id
Testing last yielded value:
v = cache.get('celery-task-%s' % session.get('task_id'))
if v:
do_someting()
If you do not like to use cache, or it's impossible, you can use db, file or any other place which celery worker and server side will have both accesss. With cache it's a simplest solution, but workers and server have to use the same cache.
A couple options to consider:
1 -- task groups. If you can enumerate all the sub tasks from the time of invocation, you can apply the group as a whole -- that returns a TaskSetResult object you can use to monitor the results of the group as a whole, or of individual tasks in the group -- query this as-needed when you need to check status.
2 -- callbacks. If you can't enumerate all sub tasks (or even if you can!) you can define a web hook / callback that's the last step in the task -- called when the rest of the task completes. The hook would be against a URI in your app that ingests the result and makes it available via DB or app-internal API.
Some combination of these could solve your challenge.
See also this great PyCon preso from one of the Instagram engineers.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/2013/04/how-instagram-feeds-work-celery-and-rabbitmq.html
At video mark 16:00, he discusses how they structure long lists of sub-tasks.

Running a task after all tasks have been completed

I'm writing an application which needs to run a series of tasks in parallel and then a single task with the results of all the tasks run:
#celery.task
def power(value, expo):
return value ** expo
#celery.task
def amass(values):
print str(values)
It's a very contrived and oversimplified example, but hopefully the point comes across well. Basically, I have many items which need to run through power, but I only want to run amass on the results from all of the tasks. All of this should happen asynchronously, and I don't need anything back from the amass method.
Does anyone know how to set this up in celery so that everything is executed asynchronously and a single callback with a list of the results is called after all is said and done?
I've setup this example to run with a chord as Alexander Afanasiev recommended:
from time import sleep
import random
tasks = []
for i in xrange(10):
tasks.append(power.s((i, 2)))
sleep(random.randint(10, 1000) / 1000.0) # sleep for 10-1000ms
callback = amass.s()
r = chord(tasks)(callback)
Unfortunately, in the above example, all tasks in tasks are started only when the chord method is called. Is there a way that each task can start separately and then I could add a callback to the group to run when everything has finished?
Here's a solution which worked for my purposes:
tasks.py:
from time import sleep
import random
#celery.task
def power(value, expo):
sleep(random.randint(10, 1000) / 1000.0) # sleep for 10-1000ms
return value ** expo
#celery.task
def amass(results, tasks):
completed_tasks = []
for task in tasks:
if task.ready():
completed_tasks.append(task)
results.append(task.get())
# remove completed tasks
tasks = list(set(tasks) - set(completed_tasks))
if len(tasks) > 0:
# resend the task to execute at least 1 second from now
amass.delay(results, tasks, countdown=1)
else:
# we done
print results
Use Case:
tasks = []
for i in xrange(10):
tasks.append(power.delay(i, 2))
amass.delay([], tasks)
What this should do is start all of the tasks as soon as possible asynchronously. Once they've all been posted to the queue, the amass task will also be posted to the queue. The amass task will keep reposting itself until all of the other tasks have been completed.
Celery has plenty of tools for most of workflows you can imagine.
It seems you need to get use of chord. Here's a quote from docs:
A chord is just like a group but with a callback. A chord consists of
a header group and a body, where the body is a task that should
execute after all of the tasks in the header are complete.
Taking a look at this snippet from your question, it looks like you are passing a list as the chord header, rather than a group:
from time import sleep
import random
tasks = []
for i in xrange(10):
tasks.append(power.s((i, 2)))
sleep(random.randint(10, 1000) / 1000.0) # sleep for 10-1000ms
callback = amass.s()
r = chord(tasks)(callback)
Converting the list to a group should result in the behaviour you're expecting:
...
callback = amass.s()
tasks = group(tasks)
r = chord(tasks)(callback)
The answer that #alexander-afanasiev gave you is essentially right: use a chord.
Your code is OK, but tasks.append(power.s((i, 2))) is not actually executing the subtask, just adding subtasks to a list. It's chord(...)(...) the one that send as many messages to the broker as subtasks you have defined in tasks list, plus one more message for the callback subtask. When you call chord it returns as soon as it can.
If you want to know when the chord has finished you can poll for completion like with a single task using r.ready() in your sample.

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