CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonasynchronousconcurrencymultiprocessing
Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz
Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz

Reputation: 478

Make python generator run in background

Right now I have some code that does roughly the following

def generator():

    while True:
        value = do_some_lengthy_IO()
        yield value 

def model():

    for datapoint in generator():
        do_some_lengthy_computation(datapoint)

Right now, the I/O and the computation happen in serial. Ideally the should be running in parallel concurrently (the generator having ready the next value) since they share nothing but the value being passed. I started looking into this and got very confused with the multiprocessing, threading, and async stuff and could not get a minimal working example going. Also, since some of this seems to be recent features, I am using Python 3.6.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1646

Answers (1)

Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz
Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz

Reputation: 478

I ended up figuring it out. The simplest way is to use the multiprocessing package and use a pipe to communicate with the child process. I wrote a wrapper that can take any generator

import time
import multiprocessing

def bg(gen):
    def _bg_gen(gen, conn):
        while conn.recv():
            try:
                conn.send(next(gen))
            except StopIteration:
                conn.send(StopIteration)
                return

    parent_conn, child_conn = multiprocessing.Pipe()
    p = multiprocessing.Process(target=_bg_gen, args=(gen, child_conn))
    p.start()

    parent_conn.send(True)
    while True:
        parent_conn.send(True)
        x = parent_conn.recv()
        if x is StopIteration:
            return
        else:
            yield x

def generator(n):
    for i in range(n):
        time.sleep(1)
        yield i

#This takes 2s/iteration
for i in generator(100):
    time.sleep(1)

#This takes 1s/iteration
for i in bg(generator(100)):
    time.sleep(1)

The only missing thing right now is that for infinite generators the process is never killed but that can be easily added by doing a parent_conn.send(False).

Upvotes: 4

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