Context managers and multiprocessing pools

contextmanager, multiprocessing, python

Solution

First, this is a really great question! After digging around a bit in the `multiprocessing` code, I think I've found a way to do this:

When you start a `multiprocessing.Pool`, internally the `Pool` object creates a `multiprocessing.Process` object for each member of the pool. When those sub-processes are starting up, they call a `_bootstrap` function, which looks like this:

def _bootstrap(self):
    from . import util
    global _current_process
    try:
        # ... (stuff we don't care about)
        util._finalizer_registry.clear()
        util._run_after_forkers()
        util.info('child process calling self.run()')
        try:
            self.run()
            exitcode = 0 
        finally:
            util._exit_function()
        # ... (more stuff we don't care about)

The `run` method is what actually runs the `target` you gave the `Process` object. For a `Pool` process that's a method with a long-running while loop that waits for work items to come in over an internal queue. What's really interesting for us is what happened after `self.run`: `util._exit_function()` is called.

As it turns out, that function does some clean up that sounds a lot like what you're looking for:

def _exit_function(info=info, debug=debug, _run_finalizers=_run_finalizers,
                   active_children=active_children,
                   current_process=current_process):
    # NB: we hold on to references to functions in the arglist due to the
    # situation described below, where this function is called after this
    # module's globals are destroyed.

    global _exiting

    info('process shutting down')
    debug('running all "atexit" finalizers with priority >= 0')  # Very interesting!
    _run_finalizers(0)

Here's the docstring of `_run_finalizers`:

def _run_finalizers(minpriority=None):
    '''
    Run all finalizers whose exit priority is not None and at least minpriority

    Finalizers with highest priority are called first; finalizers with
    the same priority will be called in reverse order of creation.
    '''

The method actually runs through a list of finalizer callbacks and executes them:

items = [x for x in _finalizer_registry.items() if f(x)]
items.sort(reverse=True)

for key, finalizer in items:
    sub_debug('calling %s', finalizer)
    try:
        finalizer()
    except Exception:
        import traceback
        traceback.print_exc()

Perfect. So how do we get into the `_finalizer_registry`? There's an undocumented object called `Finalize` in `multiprocessing.util` that is responsible for adding a callback to the registry:

class Finalize(object):
    '''
    Class which supports object finalization using weakrefs
    '''
    def __init__(self, obj, callback, args=(), kwargs=None, exitpriority=None):
        assert exitpriority is None or type(exitpriority) is int

        if obj is not None:
            self._weakref = weakref.ref(obj, self)
        else:
            assert exitpriority is not None

        self._callback = callback
        self._args = args
        self._kwargs = kwargs or {}
        self._key = (exitpriority, _finalizer_counter.next())
        self._pid = os.getpid()

        _finalizer_registry[self._key] = self  # That's what we're looking for!

Ok, so putting it all together into an example:

import multiprocessing
from multiprocessing.util import Finalize

resource_cm = None
resource = None

class Resource(object):
    def __init__(self, args):
        self.args = args

    def __enter__(self):
        print("in __enter__ of %s" % multiprocessing.current_process())
        return self

    def __exit__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        print("in __exit__ of %s" % multiprocessing.current_process())

def open_resource(args):
    return Resource(args)

def _worker_init(args):
    global resource
    print("calling init")
    resource_cm = open_resource(args)
    resource = resource_cm.__enter__()
    # Register a finalizer
    Finalize(resource, resource.__exit__, exitpriority=16)

def hi(*args):
    print("we're in the worker")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(initializer=_worker_init, initargs=("abc",))
    pool.map(hi, range(pool._processes))
    pool.close()
    pool.join()

Output:

calling init
in __enter__ of <Process(PoolWorker-1, started daemon)>
calling init
calling init
in __enter__ of <Process(PoolWorker-2, started daemon)>
in __enter__ of <Process(PoolWorker-3, started daemon)>
calling init
in __enter__ of <Process(PoolWorker-4, started daemon)>
we're in the worker
we're in the worker
we're in the worker
we're in the worker
in __exit__ of <Process(PoolWorker-1, started daemon)>
in __exit__ of <Process(PoolWorker-2, started daemon)>
in __exit__ of <Process(PoolWorker-3, started daemon)>
in __exit__ of <Process(PoolWorker-4, started daemon)>

As you can see `__exit__` gets called in all our workers when we `join()` the pool.

Problem

Original source