Proper way of cancelling accept and closing a Python processing/multiprocessing Listener connection

Question

(I'm using the pyprocessing module in this example, but replacing processing with multiprocessing should probably work if you run python 2.6 or use the multiprocessing backport)

I currently have a program that listens to a unix socket (using a processing.connection.Listener), accept connections and spawns a thread handling the request. At a certain point I want to quit the process gracefully, but since the accept()-call is blocking and I see no way of cancelling it in a nice way. I have one way that works here (OS X) at least, setting a signal handler and signalling the process from another thread like so:

import processing
from processing.connection import Listener
import threading
import time
import os
import signal
import socket
import errno

# This is actually called by the connection handler.
def closeme():
    time.sleep(1)
    print 'Closing socket...'
    listener.close()
    os.kill(processing.currentProcess().getPid(), signal.SIGPIPE)

oldsig = signal.signal(signal.SIGPIPE, lambda s, f: None)

listener = Listener('/tmp/asdf', 'AF_UNIX')
# This is a thread that handles one already accepted connection, left out for brevity
threading.Thread(target=closeme).start()
print 'Accepting...'
try:
    listener.accept()
except socket.error, e:
    if e.args[0] != errno.EINTR:
        raise
# Cleanup here...
print 'Done...'

The only other way I've thought about is reaching deep into the connection (listener._listener._socket) and setting the non-blocking option...but that probably has some side effects and is generally really scary.

Does anyone have a more elegant (and perhaps even correct!) way of accomplishing this? It needs to be portable to OS X, Linux and BSD, but Windows portability etc is not necessary.

Clarification: Thanks all! As usual, ambiguities in my original question are revealed :)

• I need to perform cleanup after I have cancelled the listening, and I don't always want to actually exit that process.
• I need to be able to access this process from other processes not spawned from the same parent, which makes Queues unwieldy
• The reasons for threads are that:
  • They access a shared state. Actually more or less a common in-memory database, so I suppose it could be done differently.
  • I must be able to have several connections accepted at the same time, but the actual threads are blocking for something most of the time. Each accepted connection spawns a new thread; this in order to not block all clients on I/O ops.

Regarding threads vs. processes, I use threads for making my blocking ops non-blocking and processes to enable multiprocessing.

Answer 1

Isnt that what select is for??

Only call accept on the socket if the select indicates it will not block...

The select has a timeout, so you can break out occasionally occasionally to check if its time to shut down....

Answer 2

I thought I could avoid it, but it seems I have to do something like this:

from processing import connection
connection.Listener.fileno = lambda self: self._listener._socket.fileno()

import select

l = connection.Listener('/tmp/x', 'AF_UNIX')
r, w, e = select.select((l, ), (), ())
if l in r:
  print "Accepting..."
  c = l.accept()
  # ...

I am aware that this breaks the law of demeter and introduces some evil monkey-patching, but it seems this would be the most easy-to-port way of accomplishing this. If anyone has a more elegant solution I would be happy to hear it :)

Answer 3

I'm new to the multiprocessing module, but it seems to me that mixing the processing module and the threading module is counter-intuitive, aren't they targetted at solving the same problem?

Anyway, how about wrapping your listen functions into a process itself? I'm not clear how this affects the rest of your code, but this may be a cleaner alternative.

from multiprocessing import Process
from multiprocessing.connection import Listener


class ListenForConn(Process):

    def run(self):
        listener = Listener('/tmp/asdf', 'AF_UNIX')
        listener.accept()

        # do your other handling here


listen_process = ListenForConn()
listen_process.start()

print listen_process.is_alive()

listen_process.terminate()
listen_process.join()

print listen_process.is_alive()
print 'No more listen process.'

Answer 4

Probably not ideal, but you can release the block by sending the socket some data from the signal handler or the thread that is terminating the process.

EDIT: Another way to implement this might be to use the Connection Queues, since they seem to support timeouts (apologies, I misread your code in my first read).

Answer 5

I ran into the same issue. I solved it by sending a "stop" command to the listener. In the listener's main thread (the one that processes the incoming messages), every time a new message is received, I just check to see if it's a "stop" command and exit out of the main thread.

Here's the code I'm using:

def start(self):
    """
    Start listening
    """
    # set the command being executed
    self.command = self.COMMAND_RUN

    # startup the 'listener_main' method as a daemon thread
    self.listener = Listener(address=self.address, authkey=self.authkey)
    self._thread = threading.Thread(target=self.listener_main, daemon=True)
    self._thread.start()

def listener_main(self):
    """
    The main application loop
    """

    while self.command == self.COMMAND_RUN:
        # block until a client connection is recieved
        with self.listener.accept() as conn:

            # receive the subscription request from the client
            message = conn.recv()

            # if it's a shut down command, return to stop this thread
            if isinstance(message, str) and message == self.COMMAND_STOP:
                return

            # process the message

def stop(self):
    """
    Stops the listening thread
    """
    self.command = self.COMMAND_STOP
    client = Client(self.address, authkey=self.authkey)
    client.send(self.COMMAND_STOP)
    client.close()

    self._thread.join()

I'm using an authentication key to prevent would be hackers from shutting down my service by sending a stop command from an arbitrary client.

Mine isn't a perfect solution. It seems a better solution might be to revise the code in multiprocessing.connection.Listener, and add a stop() method. But, that would require sending it through the process for approval by the Python team.