ProcessPoolExecutor, BrokenProcessPool handling

Question

In this documentation ( https://pymotw.com/3/concurrent.futures/ ) it says:

"The ProcessPoolExecutor works in the same way as ThreadPoolExecutor, but uses processes instead of threads. This allows CPU-intensive operations to use a separate CPU and not be blocked by the CPython interpreter’s global interpreter lock."

This sounds great! It also says:

"If something happens to one of the worker processes to cause it to exit unexpectedly, the ProcessPoolExecutor is considered “broken” and will no longer schedule tasks."

This sounds bad :( So I guess my question is: What is considered "Unexpectedly?" Does that just mean the exit signal is not 1? Can I safely exit the thread and still keep processing a queue? The example is as follows:

from concurrent import futures
import os
import signal


with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=2) as ex:
    print('getting the pid for one worker')
    f1 = ex.submit(os.getpid)
    pid1 = f1.result()

    print('killing process {}'.format(pid1))
    os.kill(pid1, signal.SIGHUP)

    print('submitting another task')
    f2 = ex.submit(os.getpid)
    try:
        pid2 = f2.result()
    except futures.process.BrokenProcessPool as e:
        print('could not start new tasks: {}'.format(e))

Answer 1

I hadn't see it IRL, but from the code it looks like the returned file descriptors not contains the results_queue file descriptor.

from concurrent.futures.process:

    reader = result_queue._reader

    while True:
        _add_call_item_to_queue(pending_work_items,
                                work_ids_queue,
                                call_queue)

        sentinels = [p.sentinel for p in processes.values()]
        assert sentinels
        ready = wait([reader] + sentinels)
        if reader in ready:  # <===================================== THIS
            result_item = reader.recv()
        else:
            # Mark the process pool broken so that submits fail right now.
            executor = executor_reference()
            if executor is not None:
                executor._broken = True
                executor._shutdown_thread = True
                executor = None
            # All futures in flight must be marked failed
            for work_id, work_item in pending_work_items.items():
                work_item.future.set_exception(
                    BrokenProcessPool(
                        "A process in the process pool was "
                        "terminated abruptly while the future was "
                        "running or pending."
                    ))
                # Delete references to object. See issue16284
                del work_item

the wait function depends on system, but assuming linux OS (at multiprocessing.connection, removed all timeout related code):

    def wait(object_list, timeout=None):
        '''
        Wait till an object in object_list is ready/readable.

        Returns list of those objects in object_list which are ready/readable.
        '''
        with _WaitSelector() as selector:
            for obj in object_list:
                selector.register(obj, selectors.EVENT_READ)

            while True:
                ready = selector.select(timeout)
                if ready:
                    return [key.fileobj for (key, events) in ready]
                else:
                    # some timeout code