Celery restart causes redelivery of scheduled tasks in RabbitMQ - django

I have a celery worker which consumes tasks from a RabbitMQ broker. This works great until a restart of the worker. celery multi restart -A proj causes all the scheduled(Unacked) messages to become ready again which then immediately starts getting redelivered causing a delay in consumption of new incoming tasks depending on the number of the scheduled tasks.
The speed of redelivery depends on the concurrency of the workers.
Is there a way to avoid this behavior?

Related

celery beat messages never arrive to rabbitmq

I'm having a lot of problem executing certain tasks with celery beat. Some tasks like the one below get triggered by beat but the message is never received by rabbitmq.
In my django settings file I have the following perdiodic task
CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE = {
...
'update_locations': {
'task': 'cron.tasks.update_locations',
'schedule': crontab(hour='10', minute='0')
},
...
}
at 10 UTC beat executes the task as expected
[2015-05-13 10:00:00,046: DEBUG/MainProcess] cron.tasks.update_locations sent. id->a1c53d0e-96ca-4673-9d03-972888581176
but this message is never arrives to rabbitmq (I'm using the tracing module in rabbitmq to track incoming messages). I have several other tasks which seem to run fine but certain tasks like the one above never run. Running the tasks manually in django with cron.tasks.update_locations.delay() runs the task with no problem. Note my Rabbitmq is on a different server than beat.
Is there anything I can do to ensure the message was actually sent and/or received by rabbitmq? Is there a better or other way to schedule these tasks to ensure they run?
A bit hard to answer from these minimal descriptions.
why is this in the Django settings file? I would have expected the Celery config settings to have their own config object.
Look at http://celery.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/celery.html#celery.Celery.config_from_object

Celery: Do duplicate tasks get automatically executed?

I am running (Django) Celery for scheduling tasks to remote workers w1, w2, w3. Each of these workers has their own queue from which they are consuming tasks placed by a "scheduler", which is another celery task on beat on the master server:
w1: q1
w2: q2
w3: q3
The scheduler schedules tasks based on a db check, i.e. it will reschedule a task with the same parameters if the db doesn't get updated as per the task's running. So if one or more of the queues are piling up, multiple tasks with the same parameters ("duplicates" from my app's perspective) may be in multiple queues at the same time.
I'm seeing some strange behavior with this: when there are duplicate tasks in multiple queues, if one of the queues runs its instance of the task, just a few milliseconds before, the other queued up "duplicate" tasks get executed. So all of a sudden all the tasks execute at the same time, even if they were enqueued minutes apart from each other.
Is there any documentation or other reference that explains this behavior? Is it known behavior, if so how do I turn it off? I only want one instance of this task to run.

Workflow of celery

I am a beginner with django, I have celery installed.
I am confused about the working of the celery, if the queued works are handled synchronously or asynchronously. Can other works be queued when the queued work is already being processed?
Celery is a task queuing system, that is backed by a message queuing system, Celery allows you to invoke tasks asynchronously, in a way that won't block your process for the task to finish, you can wait for the task to finish using the AsyncResult.get.
Other tasks can be queued while a task is being processed, and if Celery is running more than one process/thread (which is the default case), tasks will be executed in parallel to each others.
It is your responsibility to make sure that related tasks are executed in the correct order, e.g. if the output of a task A is an input to the other task B then you should make sure that you get the result from task A before you start the task B.
Read Avoid launching synchronous subtasks from Celery documentation.
I think you're possibly a bit confused about what Celery does.
Celery isn't really responsible for queueing at all. That is taken care of by the queue itself - RabbitMQ, Redis, or whatever. The only way Celery gets involved at this end is as a library that you call inside your app to serialize to task into something suitable for putting onto the queue. Since that is done by your web app, it is exactly as synchronous or asynchronous as your app itself: usually, in production, you'd have multiple processes running your site, each of those could put things onto the queue simultaneously, but each queueing action is done in-process.
The main point of Celery is the separate worker processes. This is where the asynchronous bit comes from: the workers run completely separately from your web app, and pick tasks off the queue as necessary. They are not at all involved in the process of putting tasks onto the queue in the first place.

How to detect stale workers (or auto-restart)

We recently experienced a nasty situation with the celery framework. There were a lot of messages in the queue, however those messages weren't processed. We restarted celery and the messages started being processed again. However we do not want a situation like this happening again and are looking for a permanent solution.
It appears that celery's workers have gone stale. The documentation of celery notes the following on stale workers:
This shows that there’s 2891 messages waiting to be processed in the task queue, and there are two consumers processing them.
One reason that the queue is never emptied could be that you have a stale worker process taking the messages hostage. This could happen if the worker wasn’t properly shut down.
When a message is received by a worker the broker waits for it to be acknowledged before marking the message as processed. The broker will not re-send that message to another consumer until the consumer is shut down properly.
If you hit this problem you have to kill all workers manually and restart them
See documentation
However this relies on manual checking for stale workers, leaving lots of room for error and costing manual labor. What would be a good solution to keep celery working?
You could use supervisor or supervisor-like tools to deploy the workers, refer to Running the worker as daemon .
Moreover, you could monitor the queue status with rabbitmq-management, to check if the queue become too large, assume that you are using RabbitMQ; celery monitoring also provide some mechanisms for monitoring

Understanding how basic celery message qeueing works

I've implemented a small test which uses celery for message queueing and I just want to make sure I understand how it works on a basic level (Django-Celery, Using Redis as a broker).
My understanding is that when I place a call to start an asyncronous task, the task information is placed in redis and then a celeryd instance connected to the broker consumes and executes the task. Is this essentially what is happening?
If I setup a periodic task thats supposed to execute once every hour does that task get executed on all task consumers? If so is there a way to limit it so that only one consumer will ever execute a periodic task?
The workers will consume as many messages as the broker contains. If you have 8 workers, but only 1 message, 1 of the 8 workers will consume the message, executing the task.