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

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Threading model
===============
All OpenStack services use *green thread* model of threading, implemented
through using the Python `eventlet <http://eventlet.net/>`_ and
`greenlet <http://packages.python.org/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`_.
.. _bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/838581
.. _mailing list thread: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg08118.html
.. _impact on performance: https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg08217.html
.. _PyMySQL: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/PyMySQL_evaluation