I'm using aiohttp to build an API server that sends TCP requests off to a seperate server. The module that sends the TCP requests is synchronous and a black box for my purposes. So my problem is that these requests are blocking the entire API. I need a way to wrap the module requests in an asynchronous coroutine that won't block the rest of the API.
So, just using sleep
as a simple example, is there any way to somehow wrap time-consuming synchronous code in a non-blocking coroutine, something like this:
async def sleep_async(delay):
# After calling sleep, loop should be released until sleep is done
yield sleep(delay)
return 'I slept asynchronously'
Eventually I found an answer in this thread. The method I was looking for is run_in_executor. This allows a synchronous function to be run asynchronously without blocking an event loop.
In the sleep
example I posted above, it might look like this:
import asyncio
from time import sleep
from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor
async def sleep_async(loop, delay):
# Can set executor to None if a default has been set for loop
await loop.run_in_executor(ProcessPoolExecutor(), sleep, delay)
return 'I slept asynchronously'
Also see the following answer -> How do we call a normal function where a coroutine is expected?
You can use a decorator to wrap the sync version to an async version.
import time
from functools import wraps, partial
def wrap(func):
@wraps(func)
async def run(*args, loop=None, executor=None, **kwargs):
if loop is None:
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
pfunc = partial(func, *args, **kwargs)
return await loop.run_in_executor(executor, pfunc)
return run
@wrap
def sleep_async(delay):
time.sleep(delay)
return 'I slept asynchronously'
or use the aioify
lib
% pip install aioify
then
@aioify
def sleep_async(delay):
pass
Not sure if too late but you can also use a decorator to do your function in a thread. ALTHOUGH, note that it will still be non-coop blocking unlike async which is co-op blocking.
def wrap(func):
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
pool=ThreadPoolExecutor()
@wraps(func)
async def run(*args, loop=None, executor=None, **kwargs):
if loop is None:
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
future=pool.submit(func, *args, **kwargs)
return asyncio.wrap_future(future)
return run
Hope that helps!