Keyboard Interrupts with python's multiprocess

Question

How can I handle KeyboardInterrupt events with python's multiprocessing Pools? Here is a simple example:

from multiprocessing import Pool
from time import sleep
from sys import exit

def slowly_square(i):
    sleep(1)
    return i*i

def go():
    pool = Pool(8)
    try:
        results = pool.map(slowly_square, range(40))
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        # **** THIS PART NEVER EXECUTES. ****
        pool.terminate()
        print "You cancelled the program!"
        sys.exit(1)
    print "\nFinally, here are the results: ", results

if __name__ == "__main__":
    go()

When running the code above, the KeyboardInterrupt gets raised when I press ^C, but the process simply hangs at that point and I have to kill it externally.

I want to be able to press ^C at any time and cause all of the processes to exit gracefully.

Answer 1

I'm a newbie in Python. I was looking everywhere for answer and stumble upon this and a few other blogs and youtube videos. I have tried to copy paste the author's code above and reproduce it on my python 2.7.13 in windows 7 64- bit. It's close to what I wanna achieve.

I made my child processes to ignore the ControlC and make the parent process terminate. Looks like bypassing the child process does avoid this problem for me.

#!/usr/bin/python

from multiprocessing import Pool
from time import sleep
from sys import exit


def slowly_square(i):
    try:
        print "<slowly_square> Sleeping and later running a square calculation..."
        sleep(1)
        return i * i
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "<child processor> Don't care if you say CtrlC"
        pass


def go():
    pool = Pool(8)

    try:
        results = pool.map(slowly_square, range(40))
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pool.terminate()
        pool.close()
        print "You cancelled the program!"
        exit(1)
    print "Finally, here are the results", results


if __name__ == '__main__':
    go()

The part starting at pool.terminate() never seems to execute.

Answer 2

This is a Python bug. When waiting for a condition in threading.Condition.wait(), KeyboardInterrupt is never sent. Repro:

import threading
cond = threading.Condition(threading.Lock())
cond.acquire()
cond.wait(None)
print "done"

The KeyboardInterrupt exception won't be delivered until wait() returns, and it never returns, so the interrupt never happens. KeyboardInterrupt should almost certainly interrupt a condition wait.

Note that this doesn't happen if a timeout is specified; cond.wait(1) will receive the interrupt immediately. So, a workaround is to specify a timeout. To do that, replace

    results = pool.map(slowly_square, range(40))

with

    results = pool.map_async(slowly_square, range(40)).get(9999999)

or similar.

Answer 3

From what I have recently found, the best solution is to set up the worker processes to ignore SIGINT altogether, and confine all the cleanup code to the parent process. This fixes the problem for both idle and busy worker processes, and requires no error handling code in your child processes.

import signal

...

def init_worker():
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_IGN)

...

def main()
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(size, init_worker)

    ...

    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pool.terminate()
        pool.join()

Explanation and full example code can be found at http://noswap.com/blog/python-multiprocessing-keyboardinterrupt/ and http://github.com/jreese/multiprocessing-keyboardinterrupt respectively.

Answer 4

The voted answer does not tackle the core issue but a similar side effect.

Jesse Noller, the author of the multiprocessing library, explains how to correctly deal with CTRL+C when using multiprocessing.Pool in a old blog post.

import signal
from multiprocessing import Pool


def initializer():
    """Ignore CTRL+C in the worker process."""
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_IGN)


pool = Pool(initializer=initializer)

try:
    pool.map(perform_download, dowloads)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    pool.terminate()
    pool.join()