How to use python multiprocessing pool in continuous loop - python

I am using python multiprocessing library for executing a selenium script. My code is below :
#-- start and join multiple threads ---
thread_list = []
total_threads=10 #-- no of parallel threads
for i in range(total_threads):
t = Process(target=get_browser_and_start, args=[url,nlp,pixel])
thread_list.append(t)
print "starting thread..."
t.start()
for t in thread_list:
print "joining existing thread..."
t.join()
As I understood the join() function, it will wait for each process to complete. But I want that as soon as a process is released, it will be assigned another task to perform new function.
It can be understood like this:
Say 8 processes started in first instance.
no_of_tasks_to_perform = 100
for i in range(no_of_tasks_to_perform):
processes start(8)
if process no 2 finished executing, start new process
maintain 8 process at any point of time till
"i" is <= no_of_tasks_to_perform

Instead of starting new processes every now and then, try to put all your tasks into a multiprocessing.Queue(), and start 8 long-running processes, in each process keep accessing the task queue to get new tasks and then do the job, until there's no task any more.
In your case, it's more like this:
from multiprocessing import Queue, Process
def worker(queue):
while not queue.empty():
task = queue.get()
# now start to work on your task
get_browser_and_start(url,nlp,pixel) # url, nlp, pixel can be unpacked from task
def main():
queue = Queue()
# Now put tasks into queue
no_of_tasks_to_perform = 100
for i in range(no_of_tasks_to_perform):
queue.put([url, nlp, pixel, ...])
# Now start all processes
process = Process(target=worker, args=(queue, ))
process.start()
...
process.join()

Related

Thread not exiting

I am learning about Thread in Python and am trying to make a simple program, one that uses threads to grab a number off the Queue and print it.
I have the following code
import threading
from Queue import Queue
test_lock = threading.Lock()
tests = Queue()
def start_thread():
while not tests.empty():
with test_lock:
if tests.empty():
return
test = tests.get()
print("{}".format(test))
for i in range(10):
tests.put(i)
threads = []
for i in range(5):
threads.append(threading.Thread(target=start_thread))
threads[i].daemon = True
for thread in threads:
thread.start()
tests.join()
When run it just prints the values and never exits.
How do I make the program exit when the Queue is empty?
From the docstring of Queue.join():
Blocks until all items in the Queue have been gotten and processed.
The count of unfinished tasks goes up whenever an item is added to the
queue. The count goes down whenever a consumer thread calls task_done()
to indicate the item was retrieved and all work on it is complete.
When the count of unfinished tasks drops to zero, join() unblocks.
So you must call tests.task_done() after processing the item.
Since your threads are daemon threads, and the queue will handle concurrent access correctly, you don't need to check if the queue is empty or use a lock. You can just do:
def start_thread():
while True:
test = tests.get()
print("{}".format(test))
tests.task_done()

End processing when all processes are trying to get from the queue and the queue is empty?

I want to set up some processes that take an input and process it and the result of this result is another task that I want to be handled. Essentially each task results in zero or multiple new tasks (of the same type) eventually all tasks will yield no new tasks.
I figured a queue would be good for this so I have an input queue and a results queue to add the tasks that result in nothing new. At any one time, the queue might be empty but more could be added if another process is working on a task.
Hence, I only want it to end when all processes are simultaneously trying to get from the input queue.
I am completely new to both python multiprocessing and multiprocessing in general.
Edited to add a basic overview of what I mean:
class Consumer(Process):
def __init__(self, name):
super().__init__(name=name)
def run():
# This is where I would have the task try to get a new task off of the
# queue and then calculate the results and put them into the queue
# After which it would then try to get a new task and repeat
# If this an all other processes are trying to get and the queue is
# empty That is the only time I know that everything is complete and can
# continue
pass
def start_processing():
in_queue = Queue()
results_queue = Queue()
consumers = [Consumer(str(i)) for i in range(cpu_count())]
for i in consumers:
i.start()
# Wait for the above mentioned conditions to be true before continuing
The JoinableQueue has been designed to fit this purpose. Joining a JoinableQueue will block until there are tasks in progress.
You can use it as follows: the main process will spawn a certain amount of worker processes assigning them the JoinableQueue. The worker processes will use the queue to produce and consume new tasks. The main process will wait by joining the queue up until no more tasks are in progress. After that, it will terminate the worker processes and quit.
A very simplified example (pseudocode):
def consumer(queue):
for task in queue.get():
results = process_task(task)
if 'more_tasks' in results:
for new_task in results['more_tasks']:
queue.put(new_task)
# signal the queue that a task has been completed
queue.task_done()
def main():
queue = JoinableQueue()
processes = start_processes(consumer, queue)
for task in initial_tasks:
queue.put(task)
queue.join() # block until all work is done
terminate_processes(processes)

python multi-processing zombie processes

I have a simple implementation of python's multi-processing module
if __name__ == '__main__':
jobs = []
while True:
for i in range(40):
# fetch one by one from redis queue
#item = item from redis queue
p = Process(name='worker '+str(i), target=worker, args=(item,))
# if p is not running, start p
if not p.is_alive():
jobs.append(p)
p.start()
for j in jobs:
j.join()
jobs.remove(j)
def worker(url_data):
"""worker function"""
print url_data['link']
What I expect this code to do:
run in infinite loop, keep waiting for Redis queue.
if Redis queue not empty, fetch item.
create 40 multiprocess.Process, not more not less
if a process has finished processing, start new process, so that ~40 process are running at all time.
I read that, to avoid zombie process that should be bound(join) to the parent, that's what I expected to achieve in the second loop. But the issue is that on launching it spawns 40 processes, workers finish processing and enter zombie state, until all currently spawned processes haven't finished,
then in next iteration of "while True", the same pattern continues.
So my question is:
How can I avoid zombie processes. and spawn new process as soon as 1 in 40 has finished
For a task like the one you described is usually better to use a different approach using Pool.
You can have the main process fetching data and the workers deal with it.
Following an example of Pool from Python Docs
def f(x):
return x*x
if __name__ == '__main__':
pool = Pool(processes=4) # start 4 worker processes
result = pool.apply_async(f, [10]) # evaluate "f(10)" asynchronously
print result.get(timeout=1) # prints "100" unless your computer is *very* slow
print pool.map(f, range(10)) # prints "[0, 1, 4,..., 81]"
I also suggest to use imap instead of map as it seems your task can be asynch.
Roughly your code will be:
p = Pool(40)
while True:
items = items from redis queue
p.imap_unordered(worker, items) #unordered version is faster
def worker(url_data):
"""worker function"""
print url_data['link']

Execute Thread 5 by 5

I have a huge list of information and my program should analyze each one of them. To speed up I want to use threads, but I want to limit them by 5. So I need to make a loop with 5 threads and when one finish their job grab a new one till the end of the list.
But I don't have a clue how to do that. Should I use queue? For now I just running 5 threads in the most simple way:
Thank you!
for thread_number in range (5):
thread = Th(thread_number)
thread.start()
Separate the idea of worker thread and task -- do not have one worker work on one task, then terminate the thread. Instead, spawn 5 threads, and let them all get tasks from a common queue. Let them each iterate until they receive a sentinel from the queue which tells them to quit.
This is more efficient than continually spawning and terminating threads after they complete just one task.
import logging
import Queue
import threading
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
N = 100
sentinel = object()
def worker(jobs):
name = threading.current_thread().name
for task in iter(jobs.get, sentinel):
logger.info(task)
logger.info('Done')
def main():
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG,
format='[%(asctime)s %(threadName)s] %(message)s',
datefmt='%H:%M:%S')
jobs = Queue.Queue()
# put tasks in the jobs Queue
for task in range(N):
jobs.put(task)
threads = [threading.Thread(target=worker, args=(jobs,))
for thread_number in range (5)]
for t in threads:
t.start()
jobs.put(sentinel) # Send a sentinel to terminate worker
for t in threads:
t.join()
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
It seems that you want a thread pool. If you're using python 3, you're lucky : there is a ThreadPoolExecutor class
Else, from this SO question, you can find various solutions, either handcrafted or using hidden modules from the python library.

Filling a queue and managing multiprocessing in python

I'm having this problem in python:
I have a queue of URLs that I need to check from time to time
if the queue is filled up, I need to process each item in the queue
Each item in the queue must be processed by a single process (multiprocessing)
So far I managed to achieve this "manually" like this:
while 1:
self.updateQueue()
while not self.mainUrlQueue.empty():
domain = self.mainUrlQueue.get()
# if we didn't launched any process yet, we need to do so
if len(self.jobs) < maxprocess:
self.startJob(domain)
#time.sleep(1)
else:
# If we already have process started we need to clear the old process in our pool and start new ones
jobdone = 0
# We circle through each of the process, until we find one free ; only then leave the loop
while jobdone == 0:
for p in self.jobs :
#print "entering loop"
# if the process finished
if not p.is_alive() and jobdone == 0:
#print str(p.pid) + " job dead, starting new one"
self.jobs.remove(p)
self.startJob(domain)
jobdone = 1
However that leads to tons of problems and errors. I wondered if I was not better suited using a Pool of process. What would be the right way to do this?
However, a lot of times my queue is empty, and it can be filled by 300 items in a second, so I'm not too sure how to do things here.
You could use the blocking capabilities of queue to spawn multiple process at startup (using multiprocessing.Pool) and letting them sleep until some data are available on the queue to process. If your not familiar with that, you could try to "play" with that simple program:
import multiprocessing
import os
import time
the_queue = multiprocessing.Queue()
def worker_main(queue):
print os.getpid(),"working"
while True:
item = queue.get(True)
print os.getpid(), "got", item
time.sleep(1) # simulate a "long" operation
the_pool = multiprocessing.Pool(3, worker_main,(the_queue,))
# don't forget the comma here ^
for i in range(5):
the_queue.put("hello")
the_queue.put("world")
time.sleep(10)
Tested with Python 2.7.3 on Linux
This will spawn 3 processes (in addition of the parent process). Each child executes the worker_main function. It is a simple loop getting a new item from the queue on each iteration. Workers will block if nothing is ready to process.
At startup all 3 process will sleep until the queue is fed with some data. When a data is available one of the waiting workers get that item and starts to process it. After that, it tries to get an other item from the queue, waiting again if nothing is available...
Added some code (submitting "None" to the queue) to nicely shut down the worker threads, and added code to close and join the_queue and the_pool:
import multiprocessing
import os
import time
NUM_PROCESSES = 20
NUM_QUEUE_ITEMS = 20 # so really 40, because hello and world are processed separately
def worker_main(queue):
print(os.getpid(),"working")
while True:
item = queue.get(block=True) #block=True means make a blocking call to wait for items in queue
if item is None:
break
print(os.getpid(), "got", item)
time.sleep(1) # simulate a "long" operation
def main():
the_queue = multiprocessing.Queue()
the_pool = multiprocessing.Pool(NUM_PROCESSES, worker_main,(the_queue,))
for i in range(NUM_QUEUE_ITEMS):
the_queue.put("hello")
the_queue.put("world")
for i in range(NUM_PROCESSES):
the_queue.put(None)
# prevent adding anything more to the queue and wait for queue to empty
the_queue.close()
the_queue.join_thread()
# prevent adding anything more to the process pool and wait for all processes to finish
the_pool.close()
the_pool.join()
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()

Categories