Don't wait for an async function to finish

Question

I have a async tornado server that calls an async function. However, that function just does some background processing, and I don't want to wait for it to finish. How can I do this? Here is an example of what I have:

@gen.coroutine
def get(self):
    yield self.process('data') # I don't want to wait here
    self.write('page')

    @gen.coroutine
    def process(self, arg):
        d = yield gen.Task(self.otherFunc, arg)
        raise gen.Return(None)

Answer 1

Simply remove the yield before self.process('data'). It will still run, but the get function won't wait for it to finish. Example:

@gen.coroutine
def get(self):
    print 'a'
    yield self.process('data') # I don't want to wait here
    print 'b'
    self.write('page')

@gen.coroutine
def process(self, arg):
    print 'c'
    d = yield gen.Task(self.otherFunc, arg)
    print 'd'
    raise gen.Return(None)

Will give a,c,d,b but:

@gen.coroutine
def get(self):
    print 'a'
    self.process('data') # I don't want to wait here
    print 'b'
    self.write('page')

@gen.coroutine
def process(self, arg):
    print 'c'
    d = yield gen.Task(self.otherFunc, arg)
    print 'd'
    raise gen.Return(None)

Can give a,c,b,d or a,b,c,d depending on order execution, but it will no longer wait until process is done to get to 'b'.