Develop Reference

Is python `threading.local` safe across requests with `Gunicorn` and `eventlet`?

We're running a Django project with gunicorn and eventlet.
I'd like to use threading.local to stash some http request data for use later in that thread (with some custom middleware). I'm wondering if this is safe with eventlet.
From the docs
Eventlet is thread-safe and can be used in conjunction with normal Python threads. The way this works is that coroutines are confined to their ‘parent’ Python thread. It’s like each thread contains its own little world of coroutines that can switch between themselves but not between coroutines in other threads.
which sounds like it might be.
But I understand that eventlet, based on reading their docs on 'How the Hubs Work', may suspend a co-routine to process another one. Is it possible, with gunicorn the an http request processing may get suspended and another http request would get picked up and processed by a co-routine in that same initial thread? And if so, does that mean that the threading.local could get shared between two requests?
Can I get away with using threading.local and be certain that each incoming request will get it's own thread.local space?
I also saw this post
the simultaneous connections are handled by green threads. Green threads are not like real threads. In simple terms, green threads are functions (coroutines) that yield whenever the function encounters I/O operation
which makes me think a single "thread" could process multiple requests. And I guess if that is true, then I wonder where exactly is threading.local? at the thread? in a co-routine eventlet (air quotes)thread(air quotes)?
Any pointers would be appreciated here.
Thanks

tl;dr: the answer is yes.
The eventlet coroutines are treated as separate threads so threading.local will work.
A longer discussion is available on the eventlet GitHub issue.

How can I offer concurrency with Pika in long-working consumers?

Short version: How can I prevent blocking Pika in a Remote Procedure Call situation?
Long version:
None of the Pika examples demonstrate my use case.
I have a Tornado server which communicates with other processes/machines over AMQP (RabbitMQ, Pika). These other processes are not very well-defined, but they will, for the most part, be returning data (see the RPC example on RabbitMQ's website). Sometimes, a process might need to take an extremely long time to process a large amount of information, but it shouldn't completely block smaller requests from being taken by the process. Or maybe the remote server is blocking because it sent out a web request. Think of it like a web server, but using AMQP instead of HTTP.
Since Pika documentation claims that it's not thread-safe, I cannot pass the connection to multiple threads (or processes, for that matter). What I want to do is start a new process, and add a socket event (for the pipe to that program) to the Pika IOLoop, as I would be able to do with Tornado. The Pika IOLoop is much different from the Tornado IOLoop, and it doesn't seem to support adding multiple handlers; it seems to operate using one "poller" on one socket.
I'd like to avoid requiring the Tornado package for this package, because I would only be using the IOLoop. It's not out of the question, but I want to see what my other options are, or if there is a solution to my problem by somehow connecting multiple Pika IOLoops/Pollers. RabbitMQ's documentation says that workers can often be "scaled up" by adding more. I'd like to avoid creating a connection for every request that comes in (if they're coming in fast).

From what you described, I believe you unfortunately either need a different communication model or need multiple Pika IOLoops/Pollers/Redundant Connections.
It sounds like from documentation and from other sites that RPC in Pika is always a blocking statement and unable to be passed around between threads. See http://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-six-python.html where the author points out that RPC in Pika is inherently blocking once you actually call the ioloop.
"When in doubt avoid RPC. If you can, you should use an asynchronous pipeline - instead of RPC-like blocking"
If you want to keep sending multiple RPC calls on the same connection before one completes, you'll need a different Asynchronous model. Multiple RPC calls on the same connection before completion isn't the usual implementation of the RPC model, though it's not technically forbidden ( http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.aix.progcomm%2Fdoc%2Fprogcomc%2Frpc_mod.htm ). I don't think Pika operates with this model, though it does have asynchronous support via callbacks (not what you are looking for I think).
If you just want to easily be able to generate new connections on the fly you could use a thread or process wrapper on a connection, where you create and block on the RPC in the other context and push to a common Queue which the main thread can monitor. Tornado might give you this, but I agree that it's a bit of overkill, and making such a connection wrapper shouldn't be all that difficult as I've done something similar for other I/O ops in less than 100 lines of Python (see Queue package for Threaded wrapper version). I think you already saw this possibility though based on your talk of multiple IOLoops.

Multi-Threading and Asynchronous sockets in python

I'm quite new to python threading/network programming, but have an assignment involving both of the above.
One of the requirements of the assignment is that for each new request, I spawn a new thread, but I need to both send and receive at the same time to the browser.
I'm currently using the asyncore library in Python to catch each request, but as I said, I need to spawn a thread for each request, and I was wondering if using both the thread and the asynchronous is overkill, or the correct way to do it?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
EDIT:
I'm writing a Proxy Server, and not sure if my client is persistent. My client is my browser (using firefox for simplicity)
It seems to reconnect for each request. My problem is that if I open a tab with http://www.google.com in it, and http://www.stackoverflow.com in it, I only get one request at a time from each tab, instead of multiple requests from google, and from SO.

I answered a question that sounds amazingly similar to your, where someone had a homework assignment to create a client server setup, with each connection being handled in a new thread: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9522339/496445
The general idea is that you have a main server loop constantly looking for a new connection to come in. When it does, you hand it off to a thread which will then do its own monitoring for new communication.
An extra bit about asyncore vs threading
From the asyncore docs:
There are only two ways to have a program on a single processor do
“more than one thing at a time.” Multi-threaded programming is the
simplest and most popular way to do it, but there is another very
different technique, that lets you have nearly all the advantages of
multi-threading, without actually using multiple threads. It’s really
only practical if your program is largely I/O bound. If your program
is processor bound, then pre-emptive scheduled threads are probably
what you really need. Network servers are rarely processor bound,
however.
As this quote suggests, using asyncore and threading should be for the most part mutually exclusive options. My link above is an example of the threading approach, where the server loop (either in a separate thread or the main one) does a blocking call to accept a new client. And when it gets one, it spawns a thread which will then continue to handle the communication, and the server goes back into a blocking call again.
In the pattern of using asyncore, you would instead use its async loop which will in turn call your own registered callbacks for various activity that occurs. There is no threading here, but rather a polling of all the open file handles for activity. You get the sense of doing things all concurrently, but under the hood it is scheduling everything serially.

When to thread?

I have never written any code that uses threads.
I have a web application that accepts a POST request, and creates an image based on the data in the body of the request.
Would I want to spin off a thread for the image creation, as to prevent the server from hanging until the image is created? Is this an appropriate use, or merely a solution looking for a problem ?
Please correct any misunderstandings I may have.

Rather than thinking about handling this via threads or even processes, consider using a distributed task manager such as Celery to manage this sort of thing.

Usual approach for handling HTTP requests synchronously is to spawn (or re-use one in the pool) new thread for each request as soon as it comes.
However, python threads are not very good for HTTP, due to GIL and some i/o and other calls blocking whole app, including other threads.
You should look into multiprocessing module for this usage. Spawn some worker processes, and then pass requests to them to process.

twisted.web2 and spawining threads for synchronous code?

So, I'm writing a python web application using the twisted web2 framework. There's a library that I need to use (SQLAlchemy, to be specific) that doesn't have asynchronous code. Would it be bad to spawn a thread to handle the request, fetch any data from the DB, and then return a response? I'm afraid that if there was a flood of requests, too many threads would be started and the server would be overwhelmed. Is there something built into twisted that prevents this from happening (eg request throttling)?

See the docs, and specifically the thread pool which lets you control how many threads are active at most. Spawning one new thread per request would definitely be an inferior idea!