Python: concurrent.futures How to make it cancelab

问题:

Python concurrent.futures and ProcessPoolExecutor provide a neat interface to schedule and monitor tasks. Futures even provide a .cancel() method:

cancel(): Attempt to cancel the call. If the call is currently being executed and cannot be cancelled then the method will return False, otherwise the call will be cancelled and the method will return True.

Unfortunately in a simmilar question (concerning asyncio) the answer claims running tasks are uncancelable using this snipped of the documentation, but the docs dont say that, only if they are running AND uncancelable.

Submitting multiprocessing.Events to the processes is also not trivially possible (doing so via parameters as in multiprocess.Process returns a RuntimeError)

What am I trying to do? I would like to partition a search space and run a task for every partition. But it is enough to have ONE solution and the process is CPU intensive. So is there an actual comfortable way to accomplish this that does not offset the gains by using ProcessPool to begin with?

Example:

from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor, FIRST_COMPLETED, wait

# function that profits from partitioned search space
def m_run(partition):
    for elem in partition:
        if elem == 135135515:
            return elem
    return False

futures = []
# used to create the partitions
steps = 100000000
with ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as pool:
    for i in range(4):
        # run 4 tasks with a partition, but only *one* solution is needed
        partition = range(i*steps,(i+1)*steps)
        futures.append(pool.submit(m_run, partition))

    done, not_done = wait(futures, return_when=FIRST_COMPLETED)
    for d in done:
        print(d.result())

    print("---")
    for d in not_done:
        # will return false for Cancel and Result for all futures
        print("Cancel: "+str(d.cancel()))
        print("Result: "+str(d.result()))

回答1:

Unfortunately, running Futures cannot be cancelled. I believe the core reason is to ensure the same API over different implementations (it's not possible to interrupt running threads or coroutines).

The Pebble library was designed to overcome this and other limitations.

from pebble import ProcessPool

def function(foo, bar=0):
    return foo + bar

with ProcessPool() as pool:
    future = pool.schedule(function, args=[1])

    # if running, the container process will be terminated 
    # a new process will be started consuming the next task
    future.cancel()  

回答2:

I found your question interesting so here's my finding.

I found the behaviour of .cancel() method is as stated in python documentation. As for your running concurrent functions, unfortunately they could not be cancelled even after they were told to do so. If my finding is correct, then I reason that Python does require a more effective .cancel() method.

Run the code below to check my finding.

from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor, as_completed
from time import time 

# function that profits from partitioned search space
def m_run(partition):
    for elem in partition:
        if elem == 3351355150:
            return elem
            break #Added to terminate loop once found
    return False

start = time()
futures = []
# used to create the partitions
steps = 1000000000
with ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as pool:
    for i in range(4):
        # run 4 tasks with a partition, but only *one* solution is needed
        partition = range(i*steps,(i+1)*steps)
        futures.append(pool.submit(m_run, partition))

    ### New Code: Start ### 
    for f in as_completed(futures):
        print(f.result())
        if f.result():
            print('break')
            break

    for f in futures:
        print(f, 'running?',f.running())
        if f.running():
            f.cancel()
            print('Cancelled? ',f.cancelled())

    print('New Instruction Ended at = ', time()-start )
print('Total Compute Time = ', time()-start )

Update: It is possible to forcefully terminate the concurrent processes via bash, but the consequence is that the main python program will terminate too. If this isn't an issue with you, then try the below code.

You have to add the below codes between the last 2 print statements to see this for yourself. Note: This code works only if you aren't running any other python3 program.

import subprocess, os, signal 
result = subprocess.run(['ps', '-C', 'python3', '-o', 'pid='],
                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.decode('utf-8').split()
print ('result =', result)
for i in result:
    print('PID = ', i)
    if i != result[0]:
        os.kill(int(i), signal.SIGKILL)
        try: 
           os.kill(int(i), 0)
           raise Exception("""wasn't able to kill the process 
                              HINT:use signal.SIGKILL or signal.SIGABORT""")
        except OSError as ex:
           continue

回答3:

I don't know why concurrent.futures.Future does not have a .kill() method, but you can accomplish what you want by shutting down the process pool with pool.shutdown(wait=False), and killing the remaining child processes by hand.

Create a function for killing child processes:

import signal, psutil

def kill_child_processes(parent_pid, sig=signal.SIGTERM):
    try:
        parent = psutil.Process(parent_pid)
    except psutil.NoSuchProcess:
        return
    children = parent.children(recursive=True)
    for process in children:
        process.send_signal(sig)

Run your code until you get the first result, then kill all remaining child processes:

from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor, FIRST_COMPLETED, wait

# function that profits from partitioned search space
def m_run(partition):
    for elem in partition:
        if elem == 135135515:
            return elem
    return False

futures = []
# used to create the partitions
steps = 100000000
pool = ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4)
for i in range(4):
    # run 4 tasks with a partition, but only *one* solution is needed
    partition = range(i*steps,(i+1)*steps)
    futures.append(pool.submit(m_run, partition))

done, not_done = wait(futures, timeout=3600, return_when=FIRST_COMPLETED)

# Shut down pool
pool.shutdown(wait=False)

# Kill remaining child processes
kill_child_processes(os.getpid())