Asyncio and rabbitmq (asynqp): how to consume from multiple queues concurrently

Question

I'm trying to consume multiple queues concurrently using python, asyncio and asynqp.

I don't understand why my asyncio.sleep() function call does not have any effect. The code doesn't pause there. To be fair, I actually don't understand in which context the callback is executed, and whether I can yield control bavck to the event loop at all (so that the asyncio.sleep() call would make sense).

What If I had to use a aiohttp.ClientSession.get() function call in my process_msg callback function? I'm not able to do it since it's not a coroutine. There has to be a way which is beyond my current understanding of asyncio.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import asyncio
import asynqp


USERS = {'betty', 'bob', 'luis', 'tony'}


def process_msg(msg):
    asyncio.sleep(10)
    print('>> {}'.format(msg.body))
    msg.ack()

async def connect():
    connection = await asynqp.connect(host='dev_queue', virtual_host='asynqp_test')
    channel = await connection.open_channel()
    exchange = await channel.declare_exchange('inboxes', 'direct')

    # we have 10 users. Set up a queue for each of them
    # use different channels to avoid any interference
    # during message consumption, just in case.
    for username in USERS:
        user_channel = await connection.open_channel()
        queue = await user_channel.declare_queue('Inbox_{}'.format(username))
        await queue.bind(exchange, routing_key=username)
        await queue.consume(process_msg)

    # deliver 10 messages to each user
    for username in USERS:
        for msg_idx in range(10):
            msg = asynqp.Message('Msg #{} for {}'.format(msg_idx, username))
            exchange.publish(msg, routing_key=username)


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(connect())
loop.run_forever()

Answer 1

I don't understand why my asyncio.sleep() function call does not have any effect.

Because asyncio.sleep() returns a future object that has to be used in combination with an event loop (or async/await semantics).

You can't use await in simple def declaration because the callback is called outside of async/await context which is attached to some event loop under the hood. In other words mixing callback style with async/await style is quite tricky.

The simple solution though is to schedule the work back to the event loop:

async def process_msg(msg):
    await asyncio.sleep(10)
    print('>> {}'.format(msg.body))
    msg.ack()

def _process_msg(msg):
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.create_task(process_msg(msg))
    # or if loop is always the same one single line is enough
    # asyncio.ensure_future(process_msg(msg))

# some code
await queue.consume(_process_msg)

Note that there is no recursion in _process_msg function, i.e. the body of process_msg is not executed while in _process_msg. The inner process_msg function will be called once the control goes back to the event loop.

This can be generalized with the following code:

def async_to_callback(coro):
    def callback(*args, **kwargs):
        asyncio.ensure_future(coro(*args, **kwargs))
    return callback

async def process_msg(msg):
    # the body

# some code
await queue.consume(async_to_callback(process_msg))