manila/doc/source/contributor/threading.rst
Tom Barron 90060722a9 doc migration: new directory layout
This patch introduces a new directory layout
in doc/source in conformance with the OpenStack
manuals project migration spec [1], moves the
existing content in manila/doc/source into the
new directories, and adjusts index files accordingly.

This is the first step in the migration process
as outlined in the spec.

[1] https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/docs-specs/specs/pike/os-manuals-migration.html

Partial-Bug: #1706181
Needed-By: I7924d94b82e7c8d9716bad7a219fc38c57970773
Depends-On: Ifc80fc56648cef74c85464321d1850e8c68449a0
Depends-On: Ia750cb049c0f53a234ea70ce1f2bbbb7a2aa9454
Change-Id: Ieea33262101a1d2459492c1c8aaac5fe042279f6
2017-08-24 09:16:25 -04:00

2.6 KiB

Threading model

All OpenStack services use green thread model of threading, implemented through using the Python eventlet and greenlet libraries.

Green threads use a cooperative model of threading: thread context switches can only occur when specific eventlet or greenlet library calls are made (e.g., sleep, certain I/O calls). From the operating system's point of view, each OpenStack service runs in a single thread.

The use of green threads reduces the likelihood of race conditions, but does not completely eliminate them. In some cases, you may need to use the @utils.synchronized(...) decorator to avoid races.

In addition, since there is only one operating system thread, a call that blocks that main thread will block the entire process.

Yielding the thread in long-running tasks

If a code path takes a long time to execute and does not contain any methods that trigger an eventlet context switch, the long-running thread will block any pending threads.

This scenario can be avoided by adding calls to the eventlet sleep method in the long-running code path. The sleep call will trigger a context switch if there are pending threads, and using an argument of 0 will avoid introducing delays in the case that there is only a single green thread:

from eventlet import greenthread
...
greenthread.sleep(0)

In current code, time.sleep(0) does the same thing as greenthread.sleep(0) if time module is patched through eventlet.monkey_patch(). To be explicit, we recommend contributors to use greenthread.sleep() instead of time.sleep().

MySQL access and eventlet

There are some MySQL DB API drivers for oslo.db, like PyMySQL, MySQL-python, etc. PyMySQL is the default MySQL DB API driver for oslo.db, and it works well with eventlet. MySQL-python uses an external C library for accessing the MySQL database. Since eventlet cannot use monkey-patching to intercept blocking calls in a C library, queries to the MySQL database will block the main thread of a service.

The Diablo release contained a thread-pooling implementation that did not block, but this implementation resulted in a bug and was removed.

See this mailing list thread for a discussion of this issue, including a discussion of the impact on performance.