Can't pickle <type 'instancemethod'> when using multiprocessing Pool.map()

The problem is that multiprocessing must pickle things to sling them among processes, and bound methods are not picklable. The workaround (whether you consider it "easy" or not;-) is to add the infrastructure to your program to allow such methods to be pickled, registering it with the copy_reg standard library method.

For example, Steven Bethard's contribution to this thread (towards the end of the thread) shows one perfectly workable approach to allow method pickling/unpickling via copy_reg.

All of these solutions are ugly because multiprocessing and pickling is broken and limited unless you jump outside the standard library.

If you use a fork of multiprocessing called pathos.multiprocesssing, you can directly use classes and class methods in multiprocessing's map functions. This is because dill is used instead of pickle or cPickle, and dill can serialize almost anything in python.

pathos.multiprocessing also provides an asynchronous map function… and it can map functions with multiple arguments (e.g. map(math.pow, [1,2,3], [4,5,6]))

See: What can multiprocessing and dill do together?

and: http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2013/12/05/Parallelism-and-Serialization/

>>> import pathos.pools as pp
>>> p = pp.ProcessPool(4)
>>> 
>>> def add(x,y):
...   return x+y
... 
>>> x = [0,1,2,3]
>>> y = [4,5,6,7]
>>> 
>>> p.map(add, x, y)
[4, 6, 8, 10]
>>> 
>>> class Test(object):
...   def plus(self, x, y): 
...     return x+y
... 
>>> t = Test()
>>> 
>>> p.map(Test.plus, [t]*4, x, y)
[4, 6, 8, 10]
>>> 
>>> p.map(t.plus, x, y)
[4, 6, 8, 10]

And just to be explicit, you can do exactly want you wanted to do in the first place, and you can do it from the interpreter, if you wanted to.

>>> import pathos.pools as pp
>>> class someClass(object):
...   def __init__(self):
...     pass
...   def f(self, x):
...     return x*x
...   def go(self):
...     pool = pp.ProcessPool(4)
...     print pool.map(self.f, range(10))
... 
>>> sc = someClass()
>>> sc.go()
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]
>>> 

Get the code here: https://github.com/uqfoundation/pathos

You could also define a __call__() method inside your someClass(), which calls someClass.go() and then pass an instance of someClass() to the pool. This object is pickleable and it works fine (for me)...