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I am trying to understand asyncio module and spend about one hour with run_coroutine_threadsafe function, I even came to the working example, it works as expected, but works with several limitations.
First of all I do not understand how should I properly call asyncio loop in main (any other) thread, in the example I call it with
run_until_complete
and give it a coroutine to make it busy with something until another thread will not give it a coroutine. What are other options I have?
What are situations when I have to mix asyncio and threading (in Python) in real life? Since as far as I understand asyncio is supposed to take place of threading in Python (due to GIL for not IO ops), if I am wrong, do not be angry and share your suggestions.
Python version is 3.7/3.8
import asyncio
import threading
import time
async def coro_func():
return await asyncio.sleep(3, 42)
def another_thread(_loop):
coro = coro_func() # is local thread coroutine which we would like to run in another thread
# _loop is a loop which was created in another thread
future = asyncio.run_coroutine_threadsafe(coro, _loop)
print(f"{threading.current_thread().name}: {future.result()}")
time.sleep(15)
print(f"{threading.current_thread().name} is Finished")
if __name__ == '__main__':
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
main_th_cor = asyncio.sleep(10)
# main_th_cor is used to make loop busy with something until another_thread will not send coroutine to it
print("START MAIN")
x = threading.Thread(target=another_thread, args=(loop, ), name="Some_Thread")
x.start()
time.sleep(1)
loop.run_until_complete(main_th_cor)
print("FINISH MAIN")
First of all I do not understand how should I properly call asyncio loop in main (any other) thread, in the example I call it with run_until_complete
and give it a coroutine to make it busy with something until another thread will not give it a coroutine. What are other options I have?
This is a good use case for loop.run_forever()
. The loop will run and serve the coroutines you submit using run_coroutine_threadsafe
. (You can even submit such coroutines from multiple threads in parallel; you never need to instantiate more than one event loop.)
You can stop the loop from a different thread by calling loop.call_soon_threadsafe(loop.stop)
.
What are situations when I have to mix asyncio and threading (in Python) in real life?
Ideally there should be none. But in the real world, they do crop up; for example:
When you are introducing asyncio into an existing large program that uses threads and blocking calls and cannot be converted to asyncio all at once. run_coroutine_threadsafe
allows regular blocking code to make use of asyncio.
When you are dealing with older "async" APIs which use threads under the hood and call the user-supplied APIs from other threads. There are many examples, such as Python's own multiprocessing
.
When you need to call blocking functions that have no async equivalent from asyncio - e.g. CPU-bound functions, legacy database drivers, things like that. This is not a use case for run_coroutine_threadsafe
, here you'd use run_in_executor
, but it is another example of mixing threads and asyncio.
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