OperationFailure: database error when threading in MongoEngine/PyMongo - django

Question

I have a function that will read data from a website, process it, and then load it into MongoDB. When I run this without threading it works fine but as soon as I set up celery tasks that just call this one function I frequently get the following error: "OperationFailure: database error: unauthorized db:dbname lock type:-1"
It's somewhat odd because if I run the non-celery version on multiple terminals, I do not get this error at all.
I suspect it has something to do with there not being an open connection to Mongo although in my code I'm opening one up right before every Mongo call.
The exact exception is below:
Task twitter[a974bfcc-d6ca-4baf-b36f-cae9143ce2d9] raised exception: OperationFailure(u'database error: unauthorized db:data lock type:-1 client:68.193.49.9',)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/celery/execute/trace.py", line 36, in trace
return cls(states.SUCCESS, retval=fun(*args, **kwargs))
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/celery/app/task/__init__.py", line 232, in __call__
return self.run(*args, **kwargs)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/celery/app/__init__.py", line 172, in run
return fun(*args, **kwargs)
File "/djangoblog/network/tasks.py", line 40, in twitter
n_twitter.GetTweetsTwitter(user)
File "/djangoblog/network/twitter.py", line 255, in GetTweetsTwitter
id = SaveTweet(user, network, tweet)
File "/djangoblog/network/twitter.py", line 150, in SaveTweet
if mmo.Moment.objects(user=user.id,source_id=id,network=network.id).count() == 0:
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mongoengine/queryset.py", line 933, in count
return self._cursor.count(with_limit_and_skip=True)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mongoengine/queryset.py", line 563, in _cursor
self._cursor_obj = self._collection.find(self._query,
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mongoengine/queryset.py", line 493, in _collection
if self._collection_obj.name not in db.collection_names():
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pymongo/database.py", line 361, in collection_names
names = [r["name"] for r in results]
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pymongo/cursor.py", line 703, in next
if len(self.__data) or self._refresh():
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pymongo/cursor.py", line 666, in _refresh
self.__uuid_subtype))
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pymongo/cursor.py", line 628, in __send_message self.__tz_aware)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pymongo/helpers.py", line 101, in _unpack_response error_object["$err"])
OperationFailure: database error: unauthorized db:data lock type:-1 client:68.193.49.9
Sorry for the formatting but if you look at the line that starts with mmo.Moment there's a connection being opened right before that's called.
Doing a bit of research it looks as if it has something to do with the way threading is handled in PyMongo - http://api.mongodb.org/python/1.5.1/faq.html#how-does-connection-pooling-work-in-pymongo - I may need to start closing the connections but I'd expect MongoEngine to be doing this..

Answer 1

This is likely due to the fact that you are not calling db.authenticate() when you start the new connection and are using auth on MongoDB.
Regarding the closing of threads, I would recommend making sure you are using connection pooling and letting the driver manage the pools (calling close() or similar manually can lead to a lot of pain).
For more info see the note in the pymongo documentation about using authenticate() in a multi-threaded environment.