[Twisted-Python] Really Basic clarification on defers

John Aherne johnaherne at rocs.co.uk
Tue Aug 4 15:26:17 MDT 2009


Kevin
Thanks for the reply.

It's good to get some feedback on how someone else would go about tackling a
particular issue. It helps to confirm whether what you a retrying makes
sense.

Thanks

John Aherne

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Kevin Horn <kevin.horn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:08 AM, John Aherne <johnaherne at rocs.co.uk>wrote:
>
>> This is a really basic problem we are trying to decide about,
>>
>> We have programs that run quite happily, so far. Its main task is to
>> receive data from port A and send it out via port B. Then receive data via
>> port B and send it out via port A. It's pretty much like a chat setup. You
>> just build up a list of connected clients and send data to them as required
>>
>> One side A receives some input from a tcp port - about 100-200 characters,
>> and forwards it to another port B. We do not need to wait for any response.
>> If we get a response we pick that up through line receiver. We also run a
>> calllater to check if we got a response on linereceiver within the timeframe
>> specified. If not we drop the connection.
>>
>> Traffic coming in from port B is analysed and some subset is sent back to
>> port A.
>>
>> Ignoring port A for the moment, just concentrating on port B, we have
>> tried three options:--
>>
>> 1. We set up a defer to handle the sendline to port B so that the reactor
>> would schedule it in its own good time. No threads involved using the
>> standard twisted setup. When we get a response through receiveline we fire
>> the callback defer. If we timeout via callLater we fire the errback to clear
>> the defer. In this case the defer does not seem to be doing very much
>>
>> 2. Now a fresh pair of eyes is looking at the code and saying why are we
>> using a deferred for sending data to port B. We could just issue a straight
>> sendline as part of the main code and carry on. If we get a response via
>> linereceiver,we process it normally, otherwise we set our callLater running
>> and timeout and lose the connection. So no deferreds required at all. It
>> does seem to work.What we are not sure about is what penalty is incurred in
>> terms of reliability or throughput by using sendline without a deferred. We
>> are not too sure what the holdup will be and whether it could end up halting
>> the show. Is it better to schedule these messages via deferreds or am I
>> missing something obvious
>>
>> 3. So we then did an experiment and used defertothread to run the sendline
>> in a separate thread with its own defer to maximise the asynchronous running
>> of the code. So now we are running threads when one of the reasons for
>> looking at twisted was that we could avoid threads as much as possible.
>>
>> The conundrum we are trying to resolve now is which option should we use.
>> Do any of the options have a built-in problem awaiting the unwary. In theory
>> all 3 options work. But if No 1 works well enough for our volume of traffic
>> should we adopt that one. Or is it better to start using the defertothread
>> option. Is there a simple answer
>>
>> The traffic is not large, upto a 100-200 remote devices on port B. They
>> will send GPS data every 20 secs, and about 500 messages of about 200 bytes
>> average throught the day. The remote devices will respond in an irregular
>> manner without dropping the connection, so we force a disconnectf if
>> important messages are not getting through. They are then forced to
>> reconnect.
>>
>> We have looked through the code searching for enlightment and it does seem
>> to be well documented, but the information we are looking for comes well
>> before the doc strings.
>>
>> Hopefully, someone can give us some pointers in the right direction.
>>
>> Thanks for any help.
>>
>> John Aherne
>>
>>
>>
> It seems to me that the volume of traffic you are dealing with isn't so
> high that you need to worry too much about direct sendline causing
> problems.  If I were writing this from scratch based on my understanding of
> what you've written above, I would probably go with option 2. (Keep in mind,
> my understanding may be flawed...so...)  However, if you've already got
> things working with option 1, and the added complexity isn't causing you any
> trouble, I don't see any real reason not to use that, since you've already
> got that working.  Others may disagree...
>
> Option 3 seems totally unnecessary to me.  I typically stay away from
> threads in Twisted unless I have a long running non-network process to deal
> with (disk access, db access, heavy math processing, etc.).  Especially
> because of the relative "heaviness" of threads when using Python (due to
> complex interactions with the GIL), I would avoid this method...it will
> probably hurt performance more than Option 1 (though still probably not
> enough to matter).
>
> Others feel free to slap me if I'm giving bad advice :)
>
> Kevin Horn
>
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