nova/doc/source/reference/threading.rst
Monty Taylor e7cc5efd20 Keep pre-commit inline with hacking and fix whitespace
The flake8 hook for pre-commit installs its own flake8 which is
not what hacking is pinned to. This results in a bunch of errors.
By doing a local hook we can cause these to be the same.

There are flake8 exclusions in tox.ini that need to be used
in pre-commit. Also we should exclude svg files from the whitespace
modifications, because who cares.

Once those are fixed, running pre-commit -a fixes some whitespace
issues. While the normal use isn't to run -a - if someone does make
a patch that touches any of these they'll get erroneous unrelated
errors compared to their lower work - so fix all of the existing
issues, which are mostly space-at-end-of-line issues it seems.

Change-Id: I78e753492e99c03b30a0a691db3bd75ee3d289c9
2019-12-12 14:56:39 +00:00

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 @lockutils.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 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, so 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.