The aim of this project is to provide a robust, cross-platform and cross-version implementation of the :class:`~concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor` class of :mod:`concurrent.futures`. It notably features:
- Deadlock free implementation: one of the major concern in standard :class:`multiprocessing.pool.Pool` and in :class:`concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor` is their ability to handle crashes of worker processes. This library intends to fix those possible deadlocks and send back meaningful errors.
- Consistent spawn behavior: All processes are started using fork/exec on POSIX systems. This ensures safer interactions with third party libraries.
- Reusable executor: strategy to avoid re-spawning a complete executor every time. A singleton executor instance can be reused (and dynamically resized if necessary) across consecutive calls to limit spawning and shutdown overhead. The worker processes can be shutdown automatically after a configurable idling timeout to free system resources.
- Transparent
cloudpickle
integration: to call interactively defined functions and lambda expressions in parallel. It is also possible to register a custom pickler implementation to handle inter-process communications. - No need for
if __name__ == "__main__":
in scripts: thanks to the use ofcloudpickle
to call functions defined in the :mod:`__main__` module, it is not required to protect the code calling parallel functions under Windows.
The recommended way to install :mod:`loky` is with :mod:`pip`,
pip install loky
:mod:`loky` can also be installed from sources using
git clone https://github.com/joblib/loky
cd loky
python setup.py install
Note that loky has an optional dependency on
psutil
to allow early memory leak detections.
The basic usage of :mod:`loky` relies on the :func:`~loky.get_reusable_executor`, which internally manages a custom :class:`~concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor` object, which is reused or re-spawned depending on the context.
import os
from time import sleep
from loky import get_reusable_executor
def say_hello(k):
pid = os.getpid()
print(f"Hello from {pid} with arg {k}")
sleep(.01)
return pid
# Create an executor with 4 worker processes, that will
# automatically shutdown after idling for 2s
executor = get_reusable_executor(max_workers=4, timeout=2)
res = executor.submit(say_hello, 1)
print("Got results:", res.result())
results = executor.map(say_hello, range(50))
n_workers = len(set(results))
print("Number of used processes:", n_workers)
assert n_workers == 4
For more advance usage, see our documentation.
To contribute to :mod:`loky`, first create an account on github. Once this is done, fork the loky repository to have your own repository, clone it using 'git clone' on the computers where you want to work. Make your changes in your clone, push them to your github account, test them on several computers, and when you are happy with them, send a pull request to the main repository.
To run the test suite, you need the
pytest
(version >= 3) and
psutil
modules. From the root of the project, run the test suite using:
pip install -e .
pytest .
While developping :mod:`loky`, we had some bad experiences trying to debug deadlocks when using :class:`multiprocessing.pool.Pool` and :class:`concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor`, especially when calling functions with non-picklable arguments or returned values at the beginning of the project. When we had to chose a name, we had dealt with so many deadlocks that we wanted some kind of invocation to repel them! Hence :mod:`loky`: a mix of a god, locks and the y that make it somehow cooler and nicer :) (and also less likely to result in name conflict in google results ^^).
Fixes to avoid those deadlocks in :mod:`concurrent.futures` were also contributed upstream in Python 3.7+, as a less mystical way to repel the deadlocks :D
This work is supported by the Center for Data Science, funded by the IDEX Paris-Saclay, ANR-11-IDEX-0003-02