Examples

Multithreading Requests

A typical usecase for lox is the following. Say you wanted to get the content of websites from a list of URLs. The first naive implementation may look something like the following.

>>> import urllib.request
>>> from time import time
>>> urls = ["http://google.com", "http://bing.com", "http://yahoo.com"]
>>> responses = []
>>>
>>> def get_content(url):
...     res = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
...     return res.read()
...
>>>
>>> t_start = time()
>>> for url in urls:
...     responses.append(get_content(url))
...
>>> t_diff = time() - t_start
>>> print("It took %.3f seconds to get 3 sites" % (t_diff,))  
It took 2.942 seconds to get 3 sites

It’s nice, simple, and it just works. However, your computer is just idling while waiting for a network response. With lox, you can just decorate the function you want to add concurrency. We replace the direct calls to the function with func.scatter which will pass all the args and kwargs to the decorated function. Finally, when we need all the function results, we call func.gather() which will return a list of the outputs of the decorated function. The outputs are guarenteed to be in the same order that the scatter were called

>>> import lox
>>> import urllib.request
>>> from time import time
>>> urls = ["http://google.com", "http://bing.com", "http://yahoo.com"]
>>>
>>> @lox.thread
... def get_content(url):
...     res = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
...     return res.read()
...
>>>
>>> t_start = time()
>>> for url in urls:
...     get_content.scatter(url)
...
-ignore-
>>> responses = get_content.gather()
>>> t_diff = time() - t_start
>>> print("It took %.3f seconds to get 3 sites" % (t_diff,))  
It took 0.928 seconds to get 3 sites

With minimal modifications, we now have a multithreaded application with significant performance improvements.

Multiprocessing

>>> import lox
>>> from time import sleep
>>>
>>> @lox.process(2)
... def job(x):
...     sleep(1)
...     return 1
...
>>>
>>> t_start = time()
>>> for i in range(5):
...     res = job(10)
...
>>> t_diff = time() - t_start
>>> print("Non-parallel took %.3f seconds" % (t_diff,))  
Non-parallel took 5.007 seconds
>>>
>>> t_start = time()
>>> for i in range(5):
...     job.scatter(10)
...
>>> res = job.gather()
>>> t_diff = time() - t_start
>>> print("Parallel took %.3f seconds" % (t_diff,))  
Parallel took 0.062 seconds

Obtaining a resource from a pool

Imagine you have 4 GPUs that are part of a data processing pipeline, and the GPUs perform the task disproportionally faster (or slower!) than the rest of the pipeline. Below we have many threads fetching and processing data, but they need to share the 4 GPUs for accelerated processing.

>>> import lox
>>>
>>> N_GPUS = 4
>>> gpus = [allocate_gpu(x) for x in range(N_GPUS)]
>>> idx_sem = lox.IndexSemaphore(N_GPUS)
>>>
>>> @lox.thread
... def process_task(url):
...     data = get_data(url)
...     data = preprocess_data(data)
...     with idx_sem() as idx:  # Obtains 0, 1, 2, or 3
...         gpu = gpus[idx]
...         result = gpu.process(data)
...     result = postprocess_data(data)
...     save_file(result)
...
>>>
>>> urls = [
...     "http://google.com",
... ]
>>> for url in urls:
...     process_task.scatter(url)
...
>>> process_task.gather()

Block until threads are done

Imagine the following scenario:

A janitor needs to clean a restroom, but is not allowed to enter until all people are out of the restroom. How do we implement this?

The easiest way is to use a lox.LightSwitch. The lightswitch pattern creates a first-in-last-out synchronization mechanism. The name of the pattern is inspired by people entering a room in the physical world. The first person to enter the room turns on the lights; then, when everyone is leaving, the last person to exit turns the lights off.

>>> restroom_occupied = Lock()
>>> restroom = LightSwitch(restroom_occupied)
>>> res = []
>>> n_people = 5

A LightSwitch is most similar to a semaphore, but it automatically acquires/releases a provided Lock when it’s internal counter increments/decrements from 0. A LightSwitch can be acquired multiple times, but must be released the same amount of times before the Lock gets released.

Here’s the janitor’s job:

>>> @lox.thread(1)
... def janitor():
...     with restroom_occupied:  # block until the restroom is no longer occupied
...         res.append("j_enter")
...         print("(%0.3f s) Janitor  entered the restroom" % (time() - t_start,))
...         sleep(1)  # clean the restroom
...         res.append("j_exit")
...         print("(%0.3f s) Janitor  exited  the restroom" % (time() - t_start,))
...

Here are the people trying to enter the rest room:

>>> @lox.thread(n_people)
... def people(id):
...     if id == 0:  # Get the starting time of execution for display purposes
...         global t_start
...         t_start = time()
...     with restroom:  # block if a janitor is in the restroom
...         res.append("p_%d_enter" % (id,))
...         print(
...             "(%0.3f s) Person %d entered the restroom"
...             % (
...                 time() - t_start,
...                 id,
...             )
...         )
...         sleep(1)  # use the restroom
...         res.append("p_%d_exit" % (id,))
...         print(
...             "(%0.3f s) Person %d exited  the restroom"
...             % (
...                 time() - t_start,
...                 id,
...             )
...         )
...

Lets start these people up:

>>> for i in range(n_people):
...     people.scatter(i)  # Person i will now attempt to enter the restroom
...     sleep(0.6)  # wait for 60% the time a person spends in the restroom
...     if i == 0:  # While the first person is in the restroom...
...         janitor_thread.start()  # the janitor would like to enter. HOWEVER...
...         print("(%0.3f s) Janitor Dispatched" % (time() - t_start))
...
>>> # Wait for all threads to finish
>>> people.gather()
>>> janitor.gather()

The results will look like:

Running Restroom Demo
(0.000 s) Person 0 entered the restroom
(0.061 s) Person 1 entered the restroom
(0.100 s) Person 0 exited  the restroom
(0.122 s) Person 2 entered the restroom
(0.162 s) Person 1 exited  the restroom
(0.182 s) Person 3 entered the restroom
(0.222 s) Person 2 exited  the restroom
(0.243 s) Person 4 entered the restroom
(0.282 s) Person 3 exited  the restroom
(0.343 s) Person 4 exited  the restroom
(0.343 s) Janitor  entered the restroom
(0.443 s) Janitor  exited  the restroom

Note that multiple people can be in the restroom. If people kept using the restroom, the Janitor would never be able to enter (technically known as thread starvation). If this is undesired for your application, look at RWLock

One-Writer-Many-Reader

It’s common that many threads may be reading from a single resource, but a single other thread may change the value of that resource.

If we used a LightSwitch as in the Janitor example above, we can see that the writer (Janitor) may never get an opporunity to acquire the resource. A RWLock solves this problem by blocking future threads from acquiring the resource until the writer acquires and subsequently releases the resource.

>>> rwlock = lox.RWLock()

The janitor task would do something like:

>>> with rwlock('w'):
...     # Perform resource write here
...

While the people task would look like

>>> with rwlock('r'):
...     # Perform resource read here
...