Why serial code is faster than concurrent.futures in this case? - python-3.x

Question

I am using the following code to process some pictures for my ML project and I would like to parallelize it.
import multiprocessing as mp
import concurrent.futures
def track_ids(seq):
'''The func is so big I can not put it here'''
ood = {}
for i in seq:
# I load around 500 images and process them
ood[i] = some Value
return ood
seqs = []
for seq in range(1, 10):# len(seqs)+1):
seq = txt+str(seq)
seqs.append(seq)
# serial call of the function
track_ids(seq)
#parallel call of the function
with concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=mp.cpu_count()) as ex:
ood_id = ex.map(track_ids, seqs)
if I run the code serially it takes 3.0 minutes but for parallel with concurrent, it takes 3.5 minutes.
can someone please explain why is that? and present a way to solve the problem.
btw, I have 12 cores.
Thanks

Answer 1

Here's a brief example of how one might go about profiling multiprocessing code vs serial execution:
from multiprocessing import Pool
from cProfile import Profile
from pstats import Stats
import concurrent.futures
def track_ids(seq):
'''The func is so big I can not put it here'''
ood = {}
for i in seq:
# I load around 500 images and process them
ood[i] = some Value
return ood
def profile_seq():
p = Profile() #one and only profiler instance
p.enable()
seqs = []
for seq in range(1, 10):# len(seqs)+1):
seq = txt+str(seq)
seqs.append(seq)
# serial call of the function
track_ids(seq)
p.disable()
return Stats(p), seqs
def track_ids_pr(seq):
p = Profile() #profile the child tasks
p.enable()
retval = track_ids(seq)
p.disable()
return (Stats(p, stream="dummy"), retval)
def profile_parallel():
p = Profile() #profile stuff in the main process
p.enable()
with concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=mp.cpu_count()) as ex:
retvals = ex.map(track_ids_pr, seqs)
p.disable()
s = Stats(p)
out = []
for ret in retvals:
s.add(ret[0])
out.append(ret[1])
return s, out
if __name__ == "__main__":
stat, retval = profile_parallel()
stat.print_stats()
EDIT: Unfortunately I found out that pstat.Stats objects cannot be used normally with multiprocessing.Queue because it is not pickleable (which is needed for the operation of concurrent.futures). Evidently it normally will store a reference to a file for the purpose of writing statistics to that file, and if none is given, it will by default grab a reference to sys.stdout. We don't actually need that reference however until we actually want to print out the statistics, so we can just give it a temporary value to prevent the pickle error, and then restore an appropriate value later. The following example should be copy-paste-able and run just fine rather than the pseudocode-ish example above.
from multiprocessing import Queue, Process
from cProfile import Profile
from pstats import Stats
import sys
def isprime(x):
for d in range(2, int(x**.5)):
if x % d == 0:
return False
return True
def foo(retq):
p = Profile()
p.enable()
primes = []
max_n = 2**20
for n in range(3, max_n):
if isprime(n):
primes.append(n)
p.disable()
retq.put(Stats(p, stream="dummy")) #Dirty hack: set `stream` to something picklable then override later
if __name__ == "__main__":
q = Queue()
p1 = Process(target=foo, args=(q,))
p1.start()
p2 = Process(target=foo, args=(q,))
p2.start()
s1 = q.get()
s1.stream = sys.stdout #restore original file
s2 = q.get()
# s2.stream #if we are just adding this `Stats` object to another the `stream` just gets thrown away anyway.
s1.add(s2) #add up the stats from both child processes.
s1.print_stats() #s1.stream gets used here, but not before. If you provide a file to write to instead of sys.stdout, it will write to that file)
p1.join()
p2.join()