Flask end response and continue processing - python

Is there a way in Flask to send the response to the client and then continue doing some processing? I have a few book-keeping tasks which are to be done, but I don't want to keep the client waiting.
Note that these are actually really fast things I wish to do, thus creating a new thread, or using a queue, isn't really appropriate here. (One of these fast things is actually adding something to a job queue.)

QUICK and EASY method.
We will use pythons Thread Library to acheive this.
Your API consumer has sent something to process and which is processed by my_task() function which takes 10 seconds to execute.
But the consumer of the API wants a response as soon as they hit your API which is return_status() function.
You tie the my_task to a thread and then return the quick response to the API consumer, while in the background the big process gets compelete.
Below is a simple POC.
import os
from flask import Flask,jsonify
import time
from threading import Thread
app = Flask(__name__)
#app.route("/")
def main():
return "Welcome!"
#app.route('/add_')
def return_status():
"""Return first the response and tie the my_task to a thread"""
Thread(target = my_task).start()
return jsonify('Response asynchronosly')
def my_task():
"""Big function doing some job here I just put pandas dataframe to csv conversion"""
time.sleep(10)
import pandas as pd
pd.DataFrame(['sameple data']).to_csv('./success.csv')
return print('large function completed')
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=8080)

Sadly teardown callbacks do not execute after the response has been returned to the client:
import flask
import time
app = flask.Flask("after_response")
#app.teardown_request
def teardown(request):
time.sleep(2)
print("teardown_request")
#app.route("/")
def home():
return "Success!\n"
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
When curling this you'll note a 2s delay before the response displays, rather than the curl ending immediately and then a log 2s later. This is further confirmed by the logs:
teardown_request
127.0.0.1 - - [25/Jun/2018 15:41:51] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
The correct way to execute after a response is returned is to use WSGI middleware that adds a hook to the close method of the response iterator. This is not quite as simple as the teardown_request decorator, but it's still pretty straight-forward:
import traceback
from werkzeug.wsgi import ClosingIterator
class AfterResponse:
def __init__(self, app=None):
self.callbacks = []
if app:
self.init_app(app)
def __call__(self, callback):
self.callbacks.append(callback)
return callback
def init_app(self, app):
# install extension
app.after_response = self
# install middleware
app.wsgi_app = AfterResponseMiddleware(app.wsgi_app, self)
def flush(self):
for fn in self.callbacks:
try:
fn()
except Exception:
traceback.print_exc()
class AfterResponseMiddleware:
def __init__(self, application, after_response_ext):
self.application = application
self.after_response_ext = after_response_ext
def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
iterator = self.application(environ, start_response)
try:
return ClosingIterator(iterator, [self.after_response_ext.flush])
except Exception:
traceback.print_exc()
return iterator
Which you can then use like this:
#app.after_response
def after():
time.sleep(2)
print("after_response")
From the shell you will see the response return immediately and then 2 seconds later the after_response will hit the logs:
127.0.0.1 - - [25/Jun/2018 15:41:51] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
after_response
This is a summary of a previous answer provided here.

I had a similar problem with my blog. I wanted to send notification emails to those subscribed to comments when a new comment was posted, but I did not want to have the person posting the comment waiting for all the emails to be sent before he gets his response.
I used a multiprocessing.Pool for this. I started a pool of one worker (that was enough, low traffic site) and then each time I need to send an email I prepare everything in the Flask view function, but pass the final send_email call to the pool via apply_async.

You can find an example on how to use celery from within Flask
here https://gist.github.com/jzempel/3201722
The gist of the idea (pun intended) is to define the long, book-keeping tasks as #celery.task and use apply_async1 or delay to from within the view to start the task

Sounds like Teardown Callbacks would support what you want. And you might want to combine it with the pattern from Per-Request After-Request Callbacks to help with organizing the code.

You can do this with WSGI's close protocol, exposed from the Werkzeug Response object's call_on_close decorator. Explained in this other answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63080968/78903

Related

Call to async endpoint gets blocked by another thread

I have a tornado webservice which is going to serve something around 500 requests per minute. All these requests are going to hit 1 specific endpoint. There is a C++ program that I have compiled using Cython and use it inside the tornado service as my processor engine. Each request that goes to /check/ will trigger a function call in the C++ program (I will call it handler) and the return value will get sent to user as response.
This is how I wrap the handler class. One important point is that I do not instantiate the handler in __init__. There is another route in my tornado code that I want to start loading the DataStructure after an authroized request hits that route. (e.g. /reload/)
executors = ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=4)
class CheckerInstance(object):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.handler = None
self.is_loading = False
self.is_live = False
def init(self):
if not self.handler:
self.handler = pDataStructureHandler()
self.handler.add_words_from_file(self.data_file_name)
self.end_loading()
self.go_live()
def renew(self):
self.handler = None
self.init()
class CheckHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
async def get(self):
query = self.get_argument("q", None).encode('utf-8')
answer = query
if not checker_instance.is_live:
self.write(dict(answer=self.get_argument("q", None), confidence=100))
return
checker_response = await checker_instance.get_response(query)
answer = checker_response[0]
confidence = checker_response[1]
if self.request.connection.stream.closed():
return
self.write(dict(correct=answer, confidence=confidence, is_cache=is_cache))
def on_connection_close(self):
self.wait_future.cancel()
class InstanceReloadHandler(BasicAuthMixin, tornado.web.RequestHandler):
def prepare(self):
self.get_authenticated_user(check_credentials_func=credentials.get, realm='Protected')
def new_file_exists(self):
return True
def can_reload(self):
return not checker_instance.is_loading
def get(self):
error = False
message = None
if not self.can_reload():
error = True
message = 'another job is being processed!'
else:
if not self.new_file_exists():
error = True
message = 'no new file found!'
else:
checker_instance.go_fake()
checker_instance.start_loading()
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current().run_in_executor(executors, checker_instance.renew)
message = 'job started!'
if self.request.connection.stream.closed():
return
self.write(dict(
success=not error, message=message
))
def on_connection_close(self):
self.wait_future.cancel()
def main():
app = tornado.web.Application(
[
(r"/", MainHandler),
(r"/check", CheckHandler),
(r"/reload", InstanceReloadHandler),
(r"/health", HealthHandler),
(r"/log-event", SubmitLogHandler),
],
debug=options.debug,
)
checker_instance = CheckerInstance()
I want this service to keep responding after checker_instance.renew starts running in another thread. But this is not what happens. When I hit the /reload/ endpoint and renew function starts working, any request to /check/ halts and waits for the reloading process to finish and then it starts working again. When the DataStructure is being loaded, the service should be in fake mode and respond to people with the same query that they send as input.
I have tested this code in my development environment with an i5 CPU (4 CPU cores) and it works just fine! But in the production environment (3 double-thread CPU cores) the /check/ endpoint halts requests.
It is difficult to fully trace the events being handled because you have clipped out some of the code for brevity. For instance, I don't see a get_response implementation here so I don't know if it is awaiting something itself that could be dependent on the state of checker_instance.
One area I would explore is in the thread-safety (or seeming absence of) in passing the checker_instance.renew to run_in_executor. This feels questionable to me because you are mutating the state of a single instance of CheckerInstance from a separate thread. While it might not break things explicitly, it does seem like this could be introducing odd race conditions or unanticipated copies of memory that might explain the unexpected behavior you are experiencing
If possible, I would make whatever load behavior you have that you want to offload to a thread be completely self-contained and when the data is loaded, return it as the function result which can then be fed back into you checker_instance. If you were to do this with the code as-is, you would want to await the run_in_executor call for its result and then update the checker_instance. This would mean the reload GET request would wait until the data was loaded. Alternatively, in your reload GET request, you could ioloop.spawn_callback to a function that triggers the run_in_executor in this manner, allowing the reload request to complete instead of waiting.

(flask + socket.IO) Result of emit callback is the response of my REST endpoint

Just to give a context here, I'm a node.JS developer, but I'm on a project that I need to work with Python using Flask framework.
The problem is, when a client request to an endpoint of my rest flask app, I need to emit an event using socket.IO, and get some data from the socket server, then this data is the response of the endpoint. But I didn't figured out how to send this, because flask needs a "return" statement saying what is the response, and my callback is in another context.
Sample of what I'm trying to do: (There's some comments explaining)
import socketio
import eventlet
from flask import Flask, request
sio = socketio.Server()
app = Flask(__name__)
#app.route('/test/<param>')
def get(param):
def ack(data):
print (data) #Should be the response
sio.emit('event', param, callback=ack) # Socket server call my ack function
#Without a return statement, the endpoint return 500
if __name__ == '__main__':
app = socketio.Middleware(sio, app)
eventlet.wsgi.server(eventlet.listen(('', 8000)), app)
Maybe, the right question here is: Is this possible?
I'm going to give you one way to implement what you want specifically, but I believe you have an important design flaw in this, as I explain in a comment above. In the way you have this coded, your socketio.Server() object will broadcast to all your clients, so will not be able to get a callback. If you want to emit to one client (hopefully not the same one that sent the HTTP request), then you need to add a room=client_sid argument to the emit. Or, if you are contacting a Socket.IO server, then you need to use a Socket.IO client here, not a server.
In any case, to block your HTTP route until the callback function is invoked, you can use an Event object. Something like this:
from threading import Event
from flask import jsonify
#app.route('/test/<param>')
def get(param):
ev = threading.Event()
result = None
def ack(data):
nonlocal result
nonlocal ev
result = {'data': data}
ev.set() # unblock HTTP route
sio.emit('event', param, room=some_client_sid, callback=ack)
ev.wait() # blocks until ev.set() is called
return jsonify(result)
I had a similar problem using FastAPI + socketIO (async version) and I was stuck at the exact same point. No eventlet so could not try out the monkey patching option.
After a lot of head bangings it turns out that, for some reason, adding asyncio.sleep(.1) just before ev.wait() made everything work smoothly. Without that, emitted event actually never reach the other side (socketio client, in my scenario)

Simple async server with tornado Python

I want to write a simple async http server with Tornado.
It is not clear to me how to set the callback in order to free the server for additional requests while the current request is processed.
The code I wrote is:
import tornado.web
from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
from tornado import gen
import time
class TestHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
#gen.coroutine
def post(self, *args, **kwargs):
json_input = tornado.escape.json_decode(self.request.body)
print ('Now in POST. body: {}'.format(json_input))
self.perform_long_task(*args, **json_input)
#gen.coroutine
def perform_long_task(self, **params):
time.sleep(10)
self.write(str(params))
self.finish()
application = tornado.web.Application([
(r"/test", TestHandler),
])
application.listen(9999)
IOLoop.instance().start()
To test I tried to send few POST requests in parallel:
curl -v http://localhost:9999/test -X POST -H "Content-Type:appication/json" -d '{"key1": "val1", "key2": "val2"}' &
Currently the server is blocked while perform_long_task() is processed.
I need help getting the server to be a non-blocking.
Never use time.sleep in Tornado code!
http://www.tornadoweb.org/en/latest/faq.html#why-isn-t-this-example-with-time-sleep-running-in-parallel
Do this in your code instead:
class TestHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
#gen.coroutine
def post(self, *args, **kwargs):
json_input = tornado.escape.json_decode(self.request.body)
print ('Now in POST. body: {}'.format(json_input))
# NOTE: yield here
yield self.perform_long_task(*args, **json_input)
#gen.coroutine
def perform_long_task(self, **params):
yield gen.sleep(10)
self.write(str(params))
# NOTE: no need for self.finish()
You don't need to call self.finish - when the "post" coroutine finishes, Tornado automatically finishes the request.
You must yield self.perform_long_task(), though, otherwise Tornado will end your request early, before you've called "self.write()".
Once you make these changes, two "curl" commands will show that you're doing concurrent processing in Tornado.
I'm still using time.sleep() as my code calls other code that I can't control how is written.
The FAQ http://www.tornadoweb.org/en/latest/faq.html#why-isn-t-this-example-with-time-sleep-running-in-parallel describes three methods. The third one is what I needed.
The only change I needed in my code is to replace:
yield self.perform_long_task(*args, **json_input)
which works only for a class that is written for async,
with:
yield executor.submit(self.perform_long_task,*args, **json_input)
All replies and comments were helpful. Many thanks!

How to use tornado's asynchttpclient alone?

I'm new to tornado.
What I want is to write some functions to fetch webpages asynchronously. Since no requesthandlers, apps, or servers involved here, I think I can use tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient alone.
But all the sample codes seem to be in a tornado server or requesthandler. When I tried to use it alone, it never works.
For example:
def handle(self,response):
print response
print response.body
#tornado.web.asynchronous
def fetch(self,url):
client=tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient()
client.fetch(url,self.handle)
fetch('http://www.baidu.com')
It says "'str' object has no attribute 'application'", but I'm trying to use it alone?
or :
#tornado.gen.coroutine
def fetch_with_coroutine(url):
client=tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient()
response=yield http_client.fetch(url)
print response
print response.body
raise gen.Return(response.body)
fetch_with_coroutine('http://www.baidu.com')
doesn't work either.
Earlier, I tried pass a callback to AsyncHTTPHandler.fetch, then start the IOLoop, It works and the webpage source code is printed. But I can't figure out what to do with the ioloop.
#tornado.web.asynchronous can only be applied to certain methods in RequestHandler subclasses; it is not appropriate for this usage.
Your second example is the correct structure, but you need to actually run the IOLoop. The best way to do this in a batch-style program is IOLoop.current().run_sync(fetch_with_coroutine). This starts the IOLoop, runs your callback, then stops the IOLoop. You should run a single function within run_sync(), and then use yield within that function to call any other coroutines.
For a more complete example, see https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/blob/master/demos/webspider/webspider.py
Here's an example I've used in the past...
from tornado.httpclient import AsyncHTTPClient
from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
AsyncHTTPClient.configure(None, defaults=dict(user_agent="MyUserAgent"))
http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
def handle_response(response):
if response.error:
print("Error: %s" % response.error)
else:
print(response.body)
async def get_content():
await http_client.fetch("https://www.integralist.co.uk/", handle_response)
async def main():
await get_content()
print("I won't wait for get_content to finish. I'll show immediately.")
if __name__ == "__main__":
io_loop = IOLoop.current()
io_loop.run_sync(main)
I've also detailed how to use Pipenv with tox.ini and Flake8 with this tornado example so others should be able to get up and running much more quickly https://gist.github.com/fd603239cacbb3d3d317950905b76096

How does long-polling work in Tornado?

In Tornado's chat demo, it has a method like this:
#tornado.web.asynchronous
def post(self):
cursor = self.get_argument("cursor", None)
global_message_buffer.wait_for_messages(self.on_new_messages,
cursor=cursor)
I'm fairly new to this long polling thing, and I don't really understand exactly how the threading stuff works, though it states:
By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections...
My theory was that by making a simple app:
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import time
class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
#tornado.web.asynchronous
def get(self):
print("Start request")
time.sleep(4)
print("Okay done now")
self.write("Howdy howdy howdy")
self.finish()
application = tornado.web.Application([
(r'/', MainHandler),
])
That if I made two requests in a row (i.e. I opened two browser windows and quickly refreshed both) I would see this:
Start request
Start request
Okay done now
Okay done now
Instead, I see
Start request
Okay done now
Start request
Okay done now
Which leads me to believe that it is, in fact, blocking in this case. Why is it that my code is blocking, and how do I get some code to do what I expect? I get the same output on Windows 7 with a core i7, and a linux Mint 13 box with I think two cores.
Edit:
I found one method - if someone can provide a method that works cross-platform (I'm not too worried about performance, only that it's non-blocking), I'll accept that answer.
The right way to convert your test app into a form that won't block the IOLoop is like this:
from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
import tornado.web
from tornado import gen
import time
#gen.coroutine
def async_sleep(timeout):
""" Sleep without blocking the IOLoop. """
yield gen.Task(IOLoop.instance().add_timeout, time.time() + timeout)
class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
#gen.coroutine
def get(self):
print("Start request")
yield async_sleep(4)
print("Okay done now")
self.write("Howdy howdy howdy")
self.finish()
if __name__ == "__main__":
application = tornado.web.Application([
(r'/', MainHandler),
])
application.listen(8888)
IOLoop.instance().start()
The difference is replacing the call to time.sleep with one which won't block the IOLoop. Tornado is designed to handle lots of concurrent I/O without needing multiple threads/subprocesses, but it will still block if you use synchronous APIs. In order for your long-polling solution to handle concurrency the way you'd like, you have to make sure that no long-running calls block.
The problem with the code in original question is that when you call time.sleep(4) you are effectively blocking the execution of event loop for 4 seconds. And accepted answer doesn't solve the problem either (IMHO).
Asynchronous serving in Tornado works on trust. Tornado will call your functions whenever something happens, but it trusts you that you will return control to it as soon as possible. If you block with time.sleep() then this trust is breached - Tornado can't handle new connections.
Using multiple threads only hides the mistake; running Tornado with thousands of threads (so you can serve 1000s of connections simultaneously) would be very inefficient. The appropriate way is running a single thread which only blocks inside Tornado (on select or whatever Tornado's way of listening for events is) - not on your code (to be exact: never on your code).
The proper solution is to just return from get(self) right before time.sleep() (without calling self.finish()), like this:
class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
#tornado.web.asynchronous
def get(self):
print("Starting")
You must of course remember that this request is still open and call write() and finish() on it later.
I suggest you take a look at chat demo. Once you strip out the authentication you get a very nice example of async long polling server.
Since Tornado 5.0, asyncio is enabled automatically, so pretty much just changing time.sleep(4) to await asyncio.sleep(4) and #tornado.web.asynchronous def get(self): to async def get(self): solves the problem.
Example:
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import asyncio
class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
async def get(self):
print("Start request")
await asyncio.sleep(4)
print("Okay done now")
self.write("Howdy howdy howdy")
self.finish()
app = tornado.web.Application([
(r'/', MainHandler),
])
app.listen(8888)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current().start()
Output:
Start request
Start request
Okay done now
Okay done now
Sources:
Tornado on asyncio
asyncio usage example

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