I am trying to create a simple socket server using the new concurrent.futures classes. I can get it to work fine with ThreadPoolExecutor but it just hangs when I use ProcessPoolExecutor and I can't understand why. Given the circumstance, I thought it might have something to do with trying to pass something to the child process that wasn't pickle-able but I don't that is the case. A simplified version of my code is below. I would appreciate any advice.
import concurrent.futures
import socket, os
HOST = ''
PORT = 9001
def request_handler(conn, addr):
pid = os.getpid()
print('PID', pid, 'handling connection from', addr)
while True:
data = conn.recv(1024)
if not data:
print('PID', pid, 'end connection')
break
print('PID', pid, 'received:', bytes.decode(data))
conn.send(data)
conn.close()
def main():
with concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as executor:
with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as sock:
sock.bind((HOST, PORT))
sock.listen(10)
print("Server listening on port", PORT)
while True:
conn, addr = sock.accept()
executor.submit(request_handler, conn, addr)
conn.close()
print("Server shutting down")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
Good call Donkopotamus, you should have posted that as the answer.
I wrapped the handler up in a try-block and when it attempts to call conn.recv() I got the exception: [Errno 10038] An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket. Since the worker process was dying badly, it deadlocked. With the try-block in place catching the error, I can continue to connect as much as I want without any deadlock.
I do not get this error if I change the code to use a ThreadPoolExecutor. I have tried several options and it looks like there is no way to properly pass a socket to the worker process in a ProcessPoolExecutor. I have found other references to this around the internet but they say it can be done on some platforms but not others. I have tried it on Windows, Linux and MacOS X and it doesn't work on any of them. This seems like a significant limitation.