tornado server is incompatible with threading module - multithreading

Question

I'm using tornado with threads.
In short, each time the websocket handler receives a requests, it start to execute a task, which might take a few minutes.
However, once a client is connected, no other client can be connected, until the first one disconnects.
Any ideas?
I've attached a minimal example that uses time.sleep to simulate long running tasks.
import tornado.web
import tornado.websocket
import tornado.httpserver
import tornado.ioloop
import time
import json
import threading
class TaskHandler(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
def open(self):
pass
def check_origin(self, origin):
return True
def on_message(self, message):
try:
print 'received: ', message
self.write_message(json.dumps({'status': 'running'}))
def worker_A(kwargs):
time.sleep(100)
pass
def worker_B(kwargs):
time.sleep(100)
pass
threads = []
for target in [worker_A, worker_B]:
t = threading.Thread(target = target, args = ({'xxx': 'yyy'}, ))
t.daemon = True
t.start()
threads.append(t)
for t in threads:
t.join()
except Exception, e:
print 'TaskHandler: exception: ', e
pass
self.write_message(json.dumps({'status': 'done'}))
def on_close(self):
pass
class Server(tornado.web.Application):
def __init__(self):
handlers = [
('/task', TaskHandler),
]
tornado.web.Application.__init__(self, handlers)
if __name__ == '__main__':
server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(Server())
server.listen(8765, address = '127.0.0.1')
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

Answer 1

You block the whole Tornado event loop for 100 seconds in t.join. Unless you have a yield statement or schedule a callback and exit a function, then your function is not asynchronous. Notice how your function "on_message" begins two threads and then calls t.join on each -- how can Tornado's event loop accomplish any other work while your function is waiting for t.join?
Instead, use a ThreadPoolExecutor something like this:
thread_pool = ThreadPoolExecutor(4)
class TaskHandler(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
# Make this an asynchronous coroutine
#gen.coroutine
def on_message_coroutine(self, message):
print 'received: ', message
self.write_message(json.dumps({'status': 'running'}))
def worker_A(kwargs):
time.sleep(100)
pass
def worker_B(kwargs):
time.sleep(100)
pass
futures = []
for target in [worker_A, worker_B]:
f = thread_pool.submit(target, {'xxx': 'yyy'})
futures.append(future)
# Now the event loop can do other things
yield futures
def on_message(self, message):
IOLoop.current().spawn_callback(self.on_message_coroutine,
message)