How would I go about using concurrent.futures and queues for a real-time scenario?
The example from the Python docs, expanded to take its work from a queue. A change to note, is that this code uses concurrent.futures.wait instead of concurrent.futures.as_completed to allow new work to be started while waiting for other work to complete.
import concurrent.futures
import urllib.request
import time
import queue
q = queue.Queue()
URLS = ['http://www.foxnews.com/',
'http://www.cnn.com/',
'http://europe.wsj.com/',
'http://www.bbc.co.uk/',
'http://some-made-up-domain.com/']
def feed_the_workers(spacing):
""" Simulate outside actors sending in work to do, request each url twice """
for url in URLS + URLS:
time.sleep(spacing)
q.put(url)
return "DONE FEEDING"
def load_url(url, timeout):
""" Retrieve a single page and report the URL and contents """
with urllib.request.urlopen(url, timeout=timeout) as conn:
return conn.read()
# We can use a with statement to ensure threads are cleaned up promptly
with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=5) as executor:
# start a future for a thread which sends work in through the queue
future_to_url = {
executor.submit(feed_the_workers, 0.25): 'FEEDER DONE'}
while future_to_url:
# check for status of the futures which are currently working
done, not_done = concurrent.futures.wait(
future_to_url, timeout=0.25,
return_when=concurrent.futures.FIRST_COMPLETED)
# if there is incoming work, start a new future
while not q.empty():
# fetch a url from the queue
url = q.get()
# Start the load operation and mark the future with its URL
future_to_url[executor.submit(load_url, url, 60)] = url
# process any completed futures
for future in done:
url = future_to_url[future]
try:
data = future.result()
except Exception as exc:
print('%r generated an exception: %s' % (url, exc))
else:
if url == 'FEEDER DONE':
print(data)
else:
print('%r page is %d bytes' % (url, len(data)))
# remove the now completed future
del future_to_url[future]
Output from fetching each url twice:
'http://www.foxnews.com/' page is 67574 bytes
'http://www.cnn.com/' page is 136975 bytes
'http://www.bbc.co.uk/' page is 193780 bytes
'http://some-made-up-domain.com/' page is 896 bytes
'http://www.foxnews.com/' page is 67574 bytes
'http://www.cnn.com/' page is 136975 bytes
DONE FEEDING
'http://www.bbc.co.uk/' page is 193605 bytes
'http://some-made-up-domain.com/' page is 896 bytes
'http://europe.wsj.com/' page is 874649 bytes
'http://europe.wsj.com/' page is 874649 bytes
At work I found a situation where I wanted to do parallel work on an unbounded stream of data. I created a small library inspired by the excellent answer already provided by Stephen Rauch.
I originally approached this problem by thinking about two separate threads, one that submits work to a queue and one that monitors the queue for any completed tasks and makes more room for new work to come in. This is similar to what Stephen Rauch proposed, where he consumes the stream using a feed_the_workers function that runs in a separate thread.
Talking to one of my colleagues, he helped me realize that you can get away with doing everything in a single thread if you define a buffered iterator that allows you to control how many elements are let out of the input stream every time you are ready to submit more work to the thread pool.
So we introduce the BufferedIter class
class BufferedIter(object):
def __init__(self, iterator):
self.iter = iterator
def nextN(self, n):
vals = []
for _ in range(n):
vals.append(next(self.iter))
return vals
which allows us to define the stream processor in the following way
import logging
import queue
import signal
import sys
import time
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor, wait, ALL_COMPLETED
level = logging.DEBUG
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
handler = logging.StreamHandler(sys.stdout)
handler.setFormatter(logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s %(message)s'))
handler.setLevel(level)
log.addHandler(handler)
log.setLevel(level)
WAIT_SLEEP = 1 # second, adjust this based on the timescale of your tasks
def stream_processor(input_stream, task, num_workers):
# Use a queue to signal shutdown.
shutting_down = queue.Queue()
def shutdown(signum, frame):
log.warning('Caught signal %d, shutting down gracefully ...' % signum)
# Put an item in the shutting down queue to signal shutdown.
shutting_down.put(None)
# Register the signal handler
signal.signal(signal.SIGTERM, shutdown)
signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, shutdown)
def is_shutting_down():
return not shutting_down.empty()
futures = dict()
buffer = BufferedIter(input_stream)
with ThreadPoolExecutor(num_workers) as executor:
num_success = 0
num_failure = 0
while True:
idle_workers = num_workers - len(futures)
if not is_shutting_down():
items = buffer.nextN(idle_workers)
for data in items:
futures[executor.submit(task, data)] = data
done, _ = wait(futures, timeout=WAIT_SLEEP, return_when=ALL_COMPLETED)
for f in done:
data = futures[f]
try:
f.result(timeout=0)
except Exception as exc:
log.error('future encountered an exception: %r, %s' % (data, exc))
num_failure += 1
else:
log.info('future finished successfully: %r' % data)
num_success += 1
del futures[f]
if is_shutting_down() and len(futures) == 0:
break
log.info("num_success=%d, num_failure=%d" % (num_success, num_failure))
Below we show an example for how to use the stream processor
import itertools
def integers():
"""Simulate an infinite stream of work."""
for i in itertools.count():
yield i
def task(x):
"""The task we would like to perform in parallel.
With some delay to simulate a time consuming job.
With a baked in exception to simulate errors.
"""
time.sleep(3)
if x == 4:
raise ValueError('bad luck')
return x * x
stream_processor(integers(), task, num_workers=3)
The output for this example is shown below
2019-01-15 22:34:40,193 future finished successfully: 1
2019-01-15 22:34:40,193 future finished successfully: 0
2019-01-15 22:34:40,193 future finished successfully: 2
2019-01-15 22:34:43,201 future finished successfully: 5
2019-01-15 22:34:43,201 future encountered an exception: 4, bad luck
2019-01-15 22:34:43,202 future finished successfully: 3
2019-01-15 22:34:46,208 future finished successfully: 6
2019-01-15 22:34:46,209 future finished successfully: 7
2019-01-15 22:34:46,209 future finished successfully: 8
2019-01-15 22:34:49,215 future finished successfully: 11
2019-01-15 22:34:49,215 future finished successfully: 10
2019-01-15 22:34:49,215 future finished successfully: 9
^C <=== THIS IS WHEN I HIT Ctrl-C
2019-01-15 22:34:50,648 Caught signal 2, shutting down gracefully ...
2019-01-15 22:34:52,221 future finished successfully: 13
2019-01-15 22:34:52,222 future finished successfully: 14
2019-01-15 22:34:52,222 future finished successfully: 12
2019-01-15 22:34:52,222 num_success=14, num_failure=1