I am using Python's ProcessPoolExecutor to run multiple processes in parallel and process them as any of them finishes. Then I look at their output and as soon as at least one of them gives satisfying answer I want to exit the program.
However, this is not possible since upon calling pool.shutdown(wait=False) I will have to wait for all active tasks in the pool to finish before I can exit my script.
Is there a way to kill all the remaining active children and exit? Also, is there a better way to stop as soon as at least one child returns the answer we are waiting for?
What you're doing is not quite clear, but executors strike me as the wrong tool entirely.
multiprocessing.Pool seems much more suitable, and allows doing exactly what you're asking for: you can iterate on imap_unordered (or apply_async and poll the results), and once you have what you were looking for just terminate() the pool then join() it.