What happens when response timeout in nginx+uwsgi+django? - django

I have a long running task which is NOT async, it will block the response of django, the server stack is nginx+uwsgi, what happens after nginx decide it's timeout, will my task (the uwsgi worker and the django view thread) be killed?

normally the request will continue in uWSGI until a "bad condition" (like sending a chunk of the response to a disconnected client) will fail. It is a configurable behaviour, but i suggest you to not touch it if you have no VERY specific reasons

Related

gUnicorn/Flask/GAE - two processes started for processing the same http request

I have an app on Google AppEngine (Python39 standard env) running on gUnicorn and Flask. I'm making a request to the server from client-side app for a long-running operation and seeing that the request processed twice. The second process (worker) started after a while (a hour and a half) after the first one has been working.
I'm not sure is it related to gUnicorn specifically or to GAE.
The server controller has logging at the beginning :
#app.route("/api/campaign/generate", methods=["GET"])
def campaign_generate():
logging.info('Entering campaign_generate');
# some very long processing here
The controller is called by clicking a button from the UI app. I checked the network in DevTools in the browser that only one request fired. And I can see that there's only one request in server logs at the moment of executing of workers (more on this follow).
The whole app.yaml is like this:
runtime: python39
default_expiration: 0
instance_class: B2
basic_scaling:
max_instances: 1
entrypoint: gunicorn -b :$PORT server.server:app --timeout 0 --workers 2
So I have 2 workers with infinite timeouts, basic scaling with max instances = 1.
I expect while the app is processing one request for a long-running operation, another worker is available for serving.
I don't expect the second worker will used to processing the same request, it's a nonsense (if only the user won't start another operation from another browser).
Thanks to timeout=0 I expect gUnicorn will wait indefinitely till the controller finishes. And only one thing that can hinder is GAE'e timeout. But thanks to basic-scaling it's 24 hours. So I expect the app should process requests for several hours without problem.
But what I'm seeing instead is that after the processing the request for a while another execution is started. Here's simplified logs I see in Cloud Logging:
13:00:58 GET /api/campaign/generate
13:00:59 Entering campaign_generate
..skipped
13:39:13 Starting generating zip-archive (it's something that takes a while)
14:25:49 Entering campaign_generate
So, at 14:25, 1:25 after the current request came another processing of the same request started!
And now there're two request processings running in parallel.
Needless to say that this increase memory pressure and doubles execution time.
When the first "worker" finished (14:29:28 in our example) its processing, its result isn't being returned to the client. It looks like gUnicorn or GAE simply abandoned the first request. And the client has to wait till the second worker finishes processing.
Why is it happening?
And how can I fix it?
Regarding http requests records in the log.
I did see only one request in Cloud Logging (the first one) when the processing was active, and even after the controller was called for the second time ('Entering campaign_generate' in logs appeared) there was not any new GET-request in the logs. But after that everything completed (actually the second processing returned a response) a mysterious second GET-request appeared. So technically after everything is done, from the server logs' view (Cloud Logging) it looks like there were two subsequent requests from the client. But there weren't! There was only one, and I can see it in the browser's DevTools.
Those two requests have different traceId and requestId http headers.
It's very hard to understand what's going on, I tried running the app locally (on the same data) but it works as intended.

Continue request django rest framework

I have a request that lasts more than 3 minutes, I want the request to be sent and immediately give the answer 200 and after the end of the work - give the result
The workflow you've described is called asynchronous task execution.
The main idea is to remove time or resource consuming parts of work from the code that handles HTTP requests and deligate it to some kind of worker. The worker might be a diffrent thread or process or even a separate service that runs on a different server.
This makes your application more responsive, as the users gets the HTTP response much quicker. Also, with this approach you can display such UI-friendly things as progress bars and status marks for the task, create retrial policies if task failes etc.
Example workflow:
user makes HTTP request initiating the task
the server creates the task, adds it to the queue and returns the HTTP response with task_id immediately
the front-end code starts ajax polling to get the results of the task passing task_id
the server handles polling HTTP requests and gets status information for this task_id. It returns the info (whether results or "still waiting") with the HTTP response
the front-end displays spinner if server returns "still waiting" or the results if they are ready
The most popular way to do this in Django is using the celery disctributed task queue.
Suppose a request comes, you will have to verify it. Then send response and use a mechanism to complete the request in the background. You will have to be clear that the request can be completed. You can use pipelining, where you put every task into pipeline, Django-Celery is an option but don't use it unless required. Find easy way to resolve the issue

Set Django Rest Framework endpoint a timeout for a specific view

I'm running Django 4.0.5 + Django Rest Framework + Nginx + Gunicorn
Sometimes, I'm going to need to handle some POST requests with a lot of data to process.
The user will wait for a "ok" or "fail" response and a list of ids resulting from the process.
Everything works fine so far for mid size body requests (this is subjective), but when I get into big ones, the process will take 1min+.
It's in these cases when I get a 500 error response from DRF, but my process in the background will keep running till the end (but user will not know it finished successfully).
I was doing some investigation and changed the Gunicorn timeout parameter (to 180), but didn't change the behavior in the service.
Is there a way to set a timeout larger than 60s at the #api_view or somewhere else?
Use celery async tasks to process such requests as background tasks.

Execute code after Response using Django's Async Views

I'm trying to execute a long running function (ex: sleep(30)) after a Django view returns a response. I've tried implementing the solutions suggested to similar questions:
How to execute code in Django after response has been sent
Execute code in Django after response has been sent to the
client
However, the client's page load only completes after the long running function completes running when using a WSGI server like gunicorn.
Now that Django supports asynchronous views is it possible to run a long running query asynchronously?
Obviously, I am looking for a solution regarding the same issue, to open a view which should start a background task and send a response to the client without waiting until started task is finished.
As far as I understand yet this is not one of the objectives of async view in Django. The problem is that all executed code is connected the the worker started to handle the http request. If the response is sent back to the client the worker cannot handle any other code / task anymore started in the view asynchronous. Therefore, all async functions require an "await" in front of. Consequently, the view will only send its response to the client if the awaited function is finished.
As I understand all background tasks must be pushed in a queue of tasks where another worker can catch each new task. There are several solution for this, like Djangp Channels or Django Q. However, I am not sure what is the most lightweighted solution.

Async worker on gunicorn seems blocking

I am using a Flask app with the gunicorn server and the gevent worker class, which according to the gunicorn documentation is an asynchronous worker. However, when I launch gunicorn with a single worker and try to make a long request (I added sleep(10) in the route function, but in reality this also happens when processing large uploads), I can't make any request until the previous one is finished. It behaves as is it is a synchronous worker, one request at a time.
Is this the normal behavior? Am I missing something about synchronous vs asynchronous workers?
If you don't monkey-patch sleep (or use gevent's non-blocking version of sleep) then a worker that blocks blocks the entire event loop.
Either call gevent.monkey.patch_all (or more specifically gevent.monkey.patch_time) or replace your call to time.sleep with gevent.sleep