The Twisted documentation led me to believe that it was OK to combine techniques such as reactor.spawnProcess() and threads.deferToThread() in the same application, that the reactor would handle this elegantly under the covers. Upon actually trying it, I found that my application deadlocks. Using multiple threads by themselves, or child processes by themselves, everything is fine.
Looking into the reactor source, I find that the SelectReactor.spawnProcess() method simply calls os.fork() without any consideration for multiple threads that might be running. This explains the deadlocks, because starting with the call to os.fork() you will have two processes with multiple concurrent threads running and doing who knows what with the same file descriptors.
My question for SO is, what is the best strategy for solving this problem?
What I have in mind is to subclass SelectReactor, so that it is a singleton and calls os.fork() only once, immediately when instantiated. The child process will run in the background and act as a server for the parent (using object serialization over pipes to communicate back and forth). The parent continues to run the application and may use threads as desired. Calls to spawnProcess() in the parent will be delegated to the child process, which will be guaranteed to have only one thread running and can therefore call os.fork() safely.
Has anyone done this before? Is there a faster way?
Returning to this issue after some time, I found that if I do this:
reactor.callFromThread(reactor.spawnProcess, *spawnargs)
instead of this:
reactor.spawnProcess(*spawnargs)
then the problem goes away in my small test case. There is a remark in the Twisted documentation "Using Processes" that led me to try this: "Most code in Twisted is not thread-safe. For example, writing data to a transport from a protocol is not thread-safe."
I suspect that the other people Jean-Paul mentioned were having this problem may be making a similar mistake. The responsibility is on the application to enforce that reactor and other API calls are being made within the correct thread. And apparently, with very narrow exceptions, the "correct thread" is nearly always the main reactor thread.