Lifetime and scope of class and instance variables in django - django

Question

While there are quite a few questions and answers on here already about the life of different variables within python I am looking for how they translate into the django environment in terms of application scope and endpoint scopes. Here is a simple version of what I am making and I want to ensure that it will behave the way I am expecting it to
my_cache/models/GlobalCache.py:
# This class should be global to the entire application and only
# load when the server is started.
class GlobalCacheobject):
_cache = {}
#classmethod
def fetch(cls):
return cls._cache
#classmethod
def flush(cls):
cls._cache = {}
#classmethod
def load_cache(cls, files_to_load_data_from):
for file in files_to_load_from:
cls._cache[file] = <load file and process its data into an entry>
my_cache/models/InstanceCache.py:
from .GlobalCache import GlobalCache
# This class will contain a reference to the global cache and use it to look
# up entries.
class InstanceCache(object):
def __init__(self, name=None):
self._name = name
self._cache = GlobalCache.fetch()
def fetch_file_data(self, file_name):
cache_entry = self._cache.get(file_name, None)
if cache_entry is None:
raise EntryNotFoundException()
return ReadOnlyInterfaceObject(cache_entry)
The intent is to have GlobalCache have a cls._cache value that will persist as long as the server is running. Calling GlobalCache.flush() will drop its global reference to the data it was tracking and calling GlobalCache.load(files_to_load_from) will populate a new instance of its data from.
The InstanceCache object is then intended to hold a reference to the current version of the data and return read-only objects for the different data sets identified by their original file name.
From my testing this seems to work, though I do not really have the InstanceCache object per se. I can load the global cache, retrieve read only objects to it and then flush the global, load it with new data. The original read only objects still return the values they were originally loaded with, new requests will use the new data values.
What I want to confirm is that GlobalCache will exist as long as the server is running and only alter its data with direct calls to flush() and load_cache(). And that when I hit an endpoint and create an InstanceCache it will keep a reference to the original data only as long as it exists. When the execution on the end point is done I would expect it to go out of scope removing the reference to the global cache and if that was the last one, it goes away and only the new/current data is kept. If it matters I am running Python 2.7.6 and django 1.5.12. Solutions that require an upgrade may be useful as well but it is not an immediate option for me.

Answer 1

The answer here is a maybe, and it also depends a lot on which app server you are using to run django (if you are running multi-process).
So, generally speaking, yes, the GlobalCache will retain its cached contents for the lifetime of the process it is in after it has been initialized.
But InstanceCache, on the other hand, is only guaranteed to be garbage collected at some time after there are no more references to it. Garbage collection is a deep field and there are often teams of people that work on the algorithms so going into exact scenarios is probably outside the scope of an answer on SO. A popular implementation of python is pypy, and you can read more about the garbage collection used in pypy here.
That said, please remember that most app servers are multi-process. Both uwsgi and gunicorn spin up child processes to serve requests. So even though GlobalCache is a singleton in its process, there may be several processes, each with its own GlobalCache. And, this GlobalCache will ultimately be garbage collected/cleaned up when the process exits. Both uwsgi and gunicorn will usually kill child processes after the child services some number of HTTP requests.