Trio’s core functionality¶
Entering trio¶
If you want to use trio, then the first thing you have to do is call
trio.run()
:
-
trio.
run
(async_fn, *args, clock=None, instruments=[])¶ Run a trio-flavored async function, and return the result.
Calling:
run(async_fn, *args)
is the equivalent of:
await async_fn(*args)
except that
run()
can (and must) be called from a synchronous context.This is trio’s main entry point. Almost every other function in trio requires that you be inside a call to
run()
.Parameters: - async_fn – An async function.
- args – Positional arguments to be passed to async_fn. If you need to
pass keyword arguments, then use
functools.partial()
. - clock –
None
to use the default system-specific monotonic clock; otherwise, an object implementing thetrio.abc.Clock
interface, like (for example) atrio.testing.MockClock
instance. - instruments (list of
trio.abc.Instrument
objects) – Any instrumentation you want to apply to this run. This can also be modified during the run; see Debugging and instrumentation.
Returns: Whatever
async_fn
returns.Raises: TrioInternalError
– if an unexpected error is encountered inside trio’s internal machinery. This is a bug and you should let us know.- Anything else – if
async_fn
raises an exception, then we propagate it.
General notes¶
Yield points¶
When writing code using trio, it’s very important to understand the concept of a yield point.
A yield point is two things:
- It’s a point where we check for cancellation, and can potentially
raise a
Cancelled
error. See Cancellation and timeouts below for more details. - It’s a point where the trio scheduler has the option of switching to a different task. (Currently, this scheduler is very simple: it simply cycles through all the runnable tasks, running each one until it hits its first yield point. But this might change in the future.)
So you need to be aware of yield points for two reasons. First, you
need to know where they are so you can make sure you’re prepared to
handle a Cancelled
error, or for another task to run and
rearrange some state out from under you. And
second, you need to know where they are so you can make sure your code
hits them fairly frequently: if you go too long before executing a
yield point, then you’ll be slow to notice cancellation and – much
worse – you’ll adversely effect the response latency of all the other
code running in the same process, because in a cooperative
multi-tasking system like trio, nothing else can run until you hit a
yield point.
To help you out here, Trio tries to make this as simple as possible. If an operation blocks (e.g., trying to read from a socket when there’s no data available), then that has to be a yield point. (Otherwise timeouts wouldn’t work, and we couldn’t get other stuff done while waiting for data to arrive.) Therefore, we make a policy that for public functions exposed by trio, if a function can block then it is always a yield point. (So if you try to read from a socket and there is data available, that doesn’t block but it’s still a yield point.)
How do we know which functions can block? They’re the async functions,
of course. So this gives us our general rule for identifying yield
points: if you see an await
, then it might be a yield point, and
if it’s await <something in trio>
then it’s definitely a yield
point.
[Note: we really need to come up with a less confusing name for yield points]
Thread safety¶
The vast majority of trio’s API is not thread safe: it can only be
used from inside a call to trio.run()
. We don’t bother
documenting this on individual calls; unless specifically noted
otherwise, you should assume that it isn’t safe to call any trio
functions from anywhere except the trio thread. (But see below if you really do need to work with threads.)
Time and clocks¶
Every call to run()
has an associated clock.
By default, trio uses an unspecified monotonic clock, but this can be
changed by passing a custom clock object to run()
(e.g. for
testing).
You should not assume that trio’s internal clock matches any other
clock you have access to, including the clocks of other concurrent
calls to trio.run()
!
The default clock is currently implemented as time.monotonic()
plus a large random offset. The idea here is to catch code that
accidentally uses time.monotonic()
early, which should help keep
our options open for changing the clock implementation later, and (more importantly)
make sure you can be confident that custom clocks like
trio.testing.MockClock
will work with third-party libraries
you don’t control.
-
trio.
current_time
()¶ Returns the current time according to trio’s internal clock.
Returns: The current time. Return type: float Raises: RuntimeError
– if not inside a call totrio.run()
.
-
await
trio.
sleep
(seconds)¶ Pause execution of the current task for the given number of seconds.
Parameters: seconds (float) – The number of seconds to sleep. May be zero to insert a yield point without actually blocking. Raises: ValueError
– if seconds is negative.
-
await
trio.
sleep_until
(deadline)¶ Pause execution of the current task until the given time.
The difference between
sleep()
andsleep_until()
is that the former takes a relative time and the latter takes an absolute time.Parameters: deadline (float) – The time at which we should wake up again. May be in the past, in which case this function yields but does not block.
-
await
trio.
sleep_forever
()¶ Pause execution of the current task forever (or until cancelled).
Equivalent to calling
await sleep(math.inf)
.
If you’re a mad scientist or otherwise feel the need to take direct
control over the PASSAGE OF TIME ITSELF, then you can implement a
custom Clock
class:
-
class
trio.abc.
Clock
¶ The interface for custom run loop clocks.
-
abstractmethod
start_clock
()¶ Do any setup this clock might need.
Called at the beginning of the run.
-
abstractmethod
current_time
()¶ Return the current time, according to this clock.
This is used to implement functions like
trio.current_time()
andtrio.move_on_after()
.Returns: The current time. Return type: float
-
abstractmethod
deadline_to_sleep_time
(deadline)¶ Compute the real time until the given deadline.
This is called before we enter a system-specific wait function like :func:~select.select`, to get the timeout to pass.
For a clock using wall-time, this should be something like:
return deadline - self.current_time()
but of course it may be different if you’re implementing some kind of virtual clock.
Parameters: deadline (float) – The absolute time of the next deadline, according to this clock. Returns: The number of real seconds to sleep until the given deadline. May be math.inf
.Return type: float
-
abstractmethod
You can also fetch a reference to the current clock, which might be useful if you’re using a custom clock class:
Cancellation and timeouts¶
Trio has a rich, composable system for cancelling work, either explicitly or when a timeout expires.
A simple timeout example¶
In the simplest case, you can apply a timeout to a block of code:
with trio.move_on_after(30):
result = await do_http_get("https://...")
print("result is", result)
print("with block finished")
We refer move_on_after()
as creating a “cancel scope”, that
contains all the code that runs inside the with
block.
If the HTTP request finishes in less than 30 seconds, then result
is set and the with
block exits normally. If it does not finish
within 30 seconds, then the cancel scope becomes “cancelled”, and the
next time do_http_get
attempts to call a blocking trio operation
it will fail immediately with a Cancelled
exception. This
exception eventually propagates out of do_http_get
, is caught by
the with
block, and execution then continues on the line
print("with block statement")
.
Note
Note that this is a simple 30 second timeout for the entire body of
the with
statement. This is different from what you might have
seen with other Python libraries, where timeouts often refer to
something more complicated. We
think this way is easier to reason about.
Handling cancellation¶
Pretty much any code you write using trio needs to have some strategy
to handle Cancelled
exceptions – even if you didn’t set a
timeout, then your caller might (and probably will).
You can catch Cancelled
, but you shouldn’t! Or more precisely,
if you do catch it, then you should do some cleanup and then re-raise
it or otherwise let it continue propagating (unless you encounter an
error, in which case it’s OK to let that propagate instead). To help
remind you of this fact, Cancelled
inherits from
BaseException
, like KeyboardInterrupt
and
SystemExit
do, so that it won’t be caught by catch-all except
Exception:
blocks.
It’s also important in any long-running code to make sure that you
regularly check for cancellation, because otherwise timeouts won’t
work! This happens implicitly every time you call a cancellable
operation; see below for details. If
you have a task that has to do a lot of work without any IO, then you
can use await sleep(0)
to insert an explicit cancel+schedule
point.
Here’s a rule of thumb for designing good trio-style (“trionic”?)
APIs: if you’re writing a reusable function, then you shouldn’t take a
timeout=
parameter, and instead let your caller worry about
it. This has several advantages. First, it leaves the caller’s options
open for deciding how they prefer to handle timeouts – for example,
they might find it easier to work with absolute deadlines instead of
relative timeouts. If they’re the ones calling into the cancellation
machinery, then they get to pick, and you don’t have to worry about
it. Second, and more importantly, this makes it easier for others to
re-use your code. If you write a http_get
function, and then I
come along later and write a log_in_to_twitter
function that needs
to internally make several http_get
calls, I don’t want to have to
figure out how to configure the individual timeouts on each of those
calls – and with trio’s timeout system, it’s totally unnecessary.
Of course, this rule doesn’t apply to APIs that need to impose
internal timeouts. For example, if you write a start_http_server
function, then you probably should give your caller some way to
configure timeouts on individual requests.
Cancellation semantics¶
You can freely nest cancellation blocks, and each Cancelled
exception “knows” which block it belongs to. So long as you don’t stop
it, the exception will keep propagating until it reaches the block
that raised it, at which point it will stop automatically.
Here’s an example:
print("starting...")
with trio.move_on_after(5):
with trio.move_on_after(10):
await sleep(20)
print("sleep finished without error")
print("move_on_after(10) finished without error")
print("move_on_after(5) finished without error")
In this code, the outer scope will expire after 5 seconds, causing the
sleep()
call to return early with a Cancelled
exception. Then this exception will propagate through the with
move_on_after(10)
line until it’s caught by the with
move_on_after(5)
context manager. So this code will print:
starting...
move_on_after(5) finished without error
The end result is that we have successfully cancelled exactly the work that was happening within the scope that was cancelled.
Looking at this, you might wonder how we can tell whether the inner
block timed out – perhaps we want to do something different, like try
a fallback procedure or report a failure to our caller. To make this
easier, move_on_after()
‘s __enter__
function returns an
object representing this cancel scope, which we can use to check
whether this scope caught a Cancelled
exception:
with trio.move_on_after(5) as cancel_scope:
await sleep(10)
print(cancel_scope.cancelled_caught) # prints "True"
The cancel_scope
object also allows you to check or adjust tvhis
scope’s deadline, explicitly trigger a cancellation without waiting
for the deadline, check if the scope has already been cancelled, and
so forth – see open_cancel_scope()
below for the full details.
Cancellations in trio are “level triggered”, meaning that once a block
has been cancelled, all cancellable operations in that block will
keep raising Cancelled
. This helps avoid some pitfalls around
resource clean-up. For example, imagine that we have a function that
connects to a remote server and sends some messages, and then cleans
up on the way out:
with trio.move_on_after(TIMEOUT):
conn = make_connection()
try:
await conn.send_hello_msg()
finally:
await conn.send_goodbye_msg()
Now suppose that the remote server stops responding, so our call to
await conn.send_hello_msg()
hangs forever. Fortunately, we were
clever enough to put a timeout around this code, so eventually the
timeout will expire and send_hello_msg
will raise
Cancelled
. But then, in the finally
block, we make another
blocking operation, which will also hang forever! At this point, if we
were using asyncio
or another library with “edge-triggered”
cancellation, we’d be in trouble: since our timeout already fired, it
wouldn’t fire again, and at this point our application would lock
up. But in trio, this doesn’t happen: the await
conn.send_goodbye_msg()
call is still inside the cancelled block, so
it will also raise Cancelled
.
Of course, if you really want to make another blocking call in your
cleanup handler, trio will let you; it’s trying to prevent you from
accidentally shooting yourself in the foot. Intentional foot-shooting
is no problem (or at least – it’s not trio’s problem). To do this,
create a new scope, and set its shield
attribute to
True
:
with trio.move_on_after(TIMEOUT):
conn = make_connection()
try:
await conn.send_hello_msg()
finally:
with move_on_after(CLEANUP_TIMEOUT) as cleanup_scope:
cleanup_scope.shield = True
await conn.send_goodbye_msg()
So long as you’re inside a scope with shield = True
set, then
you’ll be protected from outside cancellations. Note though that this
only applies to outside cancellations: if CLEANUP_TIMEOUT
expires then await conn.send_goodbye_msg()
will still be
cancelled, and if await conn.send_goodbye_msg()
call uses any
timeouts internally, then those will continue to work normally as
well. This is a pretty advanced feature that most people probably
won’t use, but it’s there for the rare cases where you need it.
Cancellation and primitive operations¶
We’ve talked a lot about what happens when an operation is cancelled, and how you need to be prepared for this whenever calling a cancellable operation... but we haven’t said which operations are cancellable.
Here’s the rule: if it’s in the trio namespace, and you use await
to call it, then it’s cancellable (see Yield points
above). Cancellable means:
- If you try to call it when inside a cancelled scope, then it will
raise
Cancelled
. - If it blocks, and while it’s blocked then one of the scopes around
it becomes cancelled, it will return early and raise
Cancelled
. - Raising
Cancelled
means that the operation did not happen. If a trio socket’ssend
method raisesCancelled
, then no data was sent. If a trio socket’srecv
method raisesCancelled
then no data was lost – it’s still sitting in the socket recieve buffer waiting for you to callrecv
again. And so forth.
There are a few idiosyncratic cases where external constraints make it impossible to fully implement these semantics. These are always documented. There is also one systematic exception:
- Async cleanup operations – like
__aexit__
methods or async close methods – are cancellable just like anything else except that if they are cancelled, they still perform a minimum level of cleanup before raisingCancelled
.
For example, closing a TLS-wrapped socket normally involves sending a
notification to the remote peer, so that they can be cryptographically
assured that you really meant to close the socket, and your connection
wasn’t just broken by a man-in-the-middle attacker. But handling this
robustly is a bit tricky. Remember our example above where the blocking
send_goodbye_msg
caused problems? That’s exactly how closing a TLS
socket works: if the remote peer has disappeared, then we may never be
able to actually send our shutdown notification, and it would be nice
if we didn’t block forever trying. Therefore, the close
method on
a TLS-wrapped socket will try to send that notification – but if it
gets cancelled, then it will give up on sending the message but will
still close the underlying socket before raising Cancelled
, so
at least you don’t leak that resource.
Cancellation API details¶
The primitive operation for creating a new cancellation scope is:
-
with
trio.
open_cancel_scope
(*, deadline=inf, shield=False) as cancel_scope¶ Returns a context manager which creates a new cancellation scope.
Cancel scope objects provide the following interface:
-
deadline
¶ Read-write,
float
. An absolute time on the current run’s clock at which this scope will automatically become cancelled. You can adjust the deadline by modifying this attribute, e.g.:# I need a little more time! cancel_scope.deadline += 30
Note that the core run loop alternates between running tasks and processing deadlines, so if the very first yield point after the deadline expires doesn’t actually block, then it may complete before we process deadlines:
with trio.open_cancel_scope(deadline=current_time()): # current_time() is now >= deadline, so cancel should fire, # at the next yield point. BUT, if the next yield point # completes instantly -- e.g., a recv on a socket that # already has data pending -- then the operation may # complete before we process deadlines, and then it's too # late to cancel (the data's already been read from the # socket): await sock.recv(1) # But the next call after that *is* guaranteed to raise # Cancelled: await sock.recv(1)
Defaults to
math.inf
, which means “no deadline”, though this can be overridden by thedeadline=
argument toopen_cancel_scope()
.
-
shield
¶ Read-write,
bool
, defaultFalse
. So long as this is set toTrue
, then the code inside this scope will not receiveCancelled
exceptions from scopes that are outside this scope. They can still receiveCancelled
exceptions from (1) this scope, or (2) scopes inside this scope. You can modify this attribute:with trio.open_cancel_scope() as cancel_scope: cancel_scope.shield = True # This cannot be interrupted by any means short of # killing the process: await sleep(10) cancel_scope.shield = False # Now this can be cancelled normally: await sleep(10)
Defaults to
False
, though this can be overridden by theshield=
argument toopen_cancel_scope()
.
-
cancel
()¶ Cancels this scope immediately.
This method is idempotent, i.e. if the scope was already cancelled then this method silently does nothing.
-
We also provide several convenience functions for the common situation of just wanting to impose a timeout on some code:
-
with
trio.
move_on_after
(seconds) as cancel_scope¶ Use as a context manager to create a cancel scope whose deadline is set to now + seconds.
Parameters: seconds (float) – The timeout. Raises: ValueError
– if timeout is less than zero.
-
with
trio.
move_on_at
(deadline) as cancel_scope¶ Use as a context manager to create a cancel scope with the given absolute deadline.
Parameters: deadline (float) – The deadline.
-
with
trio.
fail_after
(seconds) as cancel_scope¶ Creates a cancel scope with the given timeout, and raises an error if it is actually cancelled.
This function and
move_on_after()
are similar in that both create a cancel scope with a given timeout, and if the timeout expires then both will causeCancelled
to be raised within the scope. The difference is that when theCancelled
exception reachesmove_on_after()
, it’s caught and discarded. When it reachesfail_after()
, then it’s caught andTooSlowError
is raised in its place.Raises: TooSlowError
– if aCancelled
exception is raised in this scope and caught by the context manager.ValueError
– if seconds is less than zero.
-
with
trio.
fail_at
(deadline) as cancel_scope¶ Creates a cancel scope with the given deadline, and raises an error if it is actually cancelled.
This function and
move_on_at()
are similar in that both create a cancel scope with a given absolute deadline, and if the deadline expires then both will causeCancelled
to be raised within the scope. The difference is that when theCancelled
exception reachesmove_on_at()
, it’s caught and discarded. When it reachesfail_after()
, then it’s caught andTooSlowError
is raised in its place.Raises: TooSlowError
– if aCancelled
exception is raised in this scope and caught by the context manager.
Cheat sheet:
If you want to impose a timeout on a function, but you don’t care whether it timed out or not:
with trio.move_on_after(TIMEOUT): await do_whatever() # carry on!
If you want to impose a timeout on a function, and then do some recovery if it timed out:
with trio.move_on_after(TIMEOUT) as cancel_scope: await do_whatever() if cancel_scope.cancelled_caught: # The operation timed out, try something else try_to_recover()
If you want to impose a timeout on a function, and then if it times out then just give up and raise an error for your caller to deal with:
with trio.fail_after(TIMEOUT): await do_whatever()
It’s also possible to check what the current effective deadline is, which is sometimes useful:
-
trio.
current_effective_deadline
()¶ Returns the current effective deadline for the current task.
This function examines all the cancellation scopes that are currently in effect (taking into account shielding), and returns the deadline that will expire first.
One example of where this might be is useful is if your code is trying to decide whether to begin an expensive operation like an RPC call, but wants to skip it if it knows that it can’t possibly complete in the available time. Another example would be if you’re using a protocol like gRPC that propagates timeout information to the remote peer; this function gives a way to fetch that information so you can send it along.
If this is called in a context where a cancellation is currently active (i.e., a blocking call will immediately raise
Cancelled
), then returned deadline is-inf
. If it is called in a context where no scopes have a deadline set, it returnsinf
.Returns: the effective deadline, as an absolute time. Return type: float
Tasks let you do multiple things at once¶
One of trio’s core design principles is: no implicit concurrency. Every function executes in a straightforward, top-to-bottom manner, finishing each operation before moving on to the next – like Guido intended.
But, of course, the entire point of an async library is to let you do multiple things at once. The one and only way to do that in trio is through the task spawning interface. So if you want your program to walk and chew gum, this is the section for you.
Nurseries and spawning¶
Most libraries for concurrent programming let you spawn new child tasks (or threads, or whatever) willy-nilly, whenever and where-ever you feel like it. Trio is a bit different: you can’t spawn a child task unless you’re prepared to be a responsible parent. The way you demonstrate your responsibility is by creating a nursery:
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
...
And once you have a reference to a nursery object, you can spawn children into that nursery:
async def child():
...
async def parent():
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
# Make two concurrent calls to child()
nursery.spawn(child)
nursery.spawn(child)
This means that tasks form a tree: when you call run()
, then
this creates an initial task, and all your other tasks will be
children, grandchildren, etc. of the initial task.
The crucial thing about this setup is that when we exit the async
with
block, then the nursery cleanup code runs. The nursery cleanup
code does the following things:
- If the body of the
async with
block raised an exception, then it cancels all remaining child tasks and saves the exception. - It watches for child tasks to exit. If a child task exits with an exception, then it cancels all remaining child tasks and saves the exception.
- Once all child tasks have exited:
- It marks the nursery as “closed”, so no new tasks can be spawned in it.
- If there’s just one saved exception, it re-raises it, or
- If there are multiple saved exceptions, it re-raises them as a
MultiError
, or - if there are no saved exceptions, it exits normally.
Since all tasks are descendents of the initial task, one consequence
of this is that run()
can’t finish until all tasks have
finished.
Getting results from child tasks¶
The spawn
method returns a Task
object that can be used
for various things – and in particular, for retrieving the task’s
return value. Example:
async def child_fn(x):
return 2 * x
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
child_task = nursery.spawn(child_fn, 3)
# We've left the nursery, so we know child_task has completed
assert child_task.result.unwrap() == 6
See Task.result
and Result
for more details.
Child tasks and cancellation¶
In trio, child tasks inherit the parent nursery’s cancel scopes. So in this example, both the child tasks will be cancelled when the timeout expires:
with move_on_after(TIMEOUT):
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(child1)
nursery.spawn(child2)
Note that what matters here is the scopes that were active when
open_nursery()
was called, not the scopes active when
spawn
is called. So for example, the timeout block below does
nothing at all:
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
with move_on_after(TIMEOUT): # don't do this!
nursery.spawn(child)
Errors in multiple child tasks¶
Normally, in Python, only one thing happens at a time, which means that only one thing can wrong at a time. Trio has no such limitation. Consider code like:
async def broken1():
d = {}
return d["missing"]
async def broken2():
seq = range(10)
return seq[20]
async def parent():
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(broken1)
nursery.spawn(broken2)
broken1
raises KeyError
. broken2
raises
IndexError
. Obviously parent
should raise some error, but
what? In some sense, the answer should be “both of these at once”, but
in Python there can only be one exception at a time.
Trio’s answer is that it raises a MultiError
object. This is a
special exception which encapsulates multiple exception objects –
either regular exceptions or nested MultiError
s. To make these
easier to work with, trio installs a custom sys.excepthook
that
knows how to print nice tracebacks for unhandled MultiError
s,
and we also provide some helpful utilities like
MultiError.catch()
, which allows you to catch “part of” a
MultiError
.
How to be a good parent task¶
Supervising child tasks is a full time job. If you want your program to do two things at once, then don’t expect the parent task to do one while a child task does another – instead, spawn two children and let the parent focus on managing them.
So, don’t do this:
# bad idea!
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(walk)
await chew_gum()
Instead, do this:
# good idea!
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(walk)
nursery.spawn(chew_gum)
# now parent task blocks in the nursery cleanup code
The difference between these is that in the first example, if walk
crashes, the parent is off distracted chewing gum, and won’t
notice. In the second example, the parent is watching both children,
and will notice and respond appropriately if anything happens.
Spawning tasks without becoming a parent¶
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for the task that spawns a child to take on responsibility for watching it. For example, a server task may want to spawn a new task for each connection, but it can’t listen for connections and supervise children at the same time.
The solution here is simple once you see it: there’s no requirement that a nursery object stay in the task that created it! We can write code like this:
async def new_connection_listener(handler, nursery):
while True:
conn = await get_new_connection()
nursery.spawn(handler, conn)
async def server(handler):
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(new_connection_listener, handler, nursery)
Now new_connection_listener
can focus on handling new connections,
while its parent focuses on supervising both it and all the individual
connection handlers.
And remember that cancel scopes are inherited from the nursery,
not from the task that calls spawn
. So in this example, the
timeout does not apply to child
(or to anything else):
async with do_spawn(nursery):
with move_on_after(TIMEOUT): # don't do this, it has no effect
nursery.spawn(child)
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
nursery.spawn(do_spawn, nursery)
Custom supervisors¶
The default cleanup logic is often sufficient for simple cases, but what if you want a more sophisticated supervisor? For example, maybe you have Erlang envy and want features like automatic restart of crashed tasks. Trio itself doesn’t provide such a feature, but the nursery interface is designed to give you all the tools you need to build such a thing, while enforcing basic hygiene (e.g., it’s not possible to build a supervisor that exits and leaves orphaned tasks behind). And then hopefully you’ll wrap your fancy supervisor up in a library and put it on PyPI, because building custom supervisors is a challenging task that most people don’t want to deal with!
For simple custom supervisors, it’s often possible to lean on the default nursery logic to take care of annoying details. For example, here’s a function that takes a list of functions, runs them all concurrently, and returns the result from the one that finishes first:
async def race(*async_fns):
if not async_fns:
raise ValueError("must pass at least one argument")
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
for async_fn in async_fns:
nursery.spawn(async_fn)
task_batch = await nursery.monitor.get_batch()
nursery.cancel_scope.cancel()
return task_batch[0].reap_and_unwrap(finished_task)
This works by waiting until at least one task has finished, then cancelling all remaining tasks and returning the result from the first task. This implicitly invokes the default logic to take care of all the other tasks, so we block to wait for the cancellation to finish, and if any of them raise errors in the process we’ll propagate those.
Task-local storage and run-local storage¶
Synchronizing and communicating between tasks¶
Trio provides a standard set of synchronization and inter-task communication primitives. These objects’ APIs are generally modelled off of the analogous classes in the standard library, but with some differences.
Blocking and non-blocking methods¶
The standard library synchronization primitives have a variety of mechanisms for specifying timeouts and blocking behavior, and of signaling whether an operation returned due to success versus a timeout.
In trio, we standardize on the following conventions:
- We don’t provide timeout arguments. If you want a timeout, then use a cancel scope.
- For operations that have a non-blocking variant, the blocking and
non-blocking variants are different methods with names like
X
andX_nowait
, respectively. (This is similar toqueue.Queue
, but unlike most of the classes inthreading
.) We like this approach because it allows us to make the blocking version async and the non-blocking version sync. - When a non-blocking method cannot succeed (the queue is empty, the
lock is already held, etc.), then it raises
trio.WouldBlock
. There’s no equivalent to thequeue.Empty
versusqueue.Full
distinction – we just have the one exception that we use consistently.
Fairness¶
These classes are all guaranteed to be “fair”, meaning that when it comes time to choose who will be next to acquire a lock, get an item from a queue, etc., then it always goes to the task which has been waiting longest. It’s not entirely clear whether this is the best choice, but for now that’s how it works.
As an example of what this means, here’s a small program in which two
tasks compete for a lock. Notice that the task which releases the lock
always immedately attempts to re-acquire it, before the other task has
a chance to run. (And remember that we’re doing cooperative
multi-tasking here, so it’s actually deterministic that the task
releasing the lock will call acquire()
before the other
task wakes up; in trio releasing a lock is not a yield point.) With
an unfair lock, this would result in the same task holding the lock
forever and the other task being starved out. But if you run this,
you’ll see that the two tasks politely take turns:
# fairness-demo.py
import trio
async def loopy_child(number, lock):
while True:
async with lock:
print("Child {} has the lock!".format(number))
await trio.sleep(0.5)
async def main():
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
lock = trio.Lock()
nursery.spawn(loopy_child, 1, lock)
nursery.spawn(loopy_child, 2, lock)
trio.run(main)
Broadcasting an event with Event
¶
-
class
trio.
Event
¶ A waitable boolean value useful for inter-task synchronization, inspired by
threading.Event
.An event object manages an internal boolean flag, which is initially False.
-
is_set
()¶ Return the current value of the internal flag.
-
set
()¶ Set the internal flag value to True, and wake any waiting tasks.
-
clear
()¶ Set the internal flag value to False.
-
await
wait
()¶ Block until the internal flag value becomes True.
If it’s already True, then this method is still a yield point, but otherwise returns immediately.
-
Passing messages with Queue
and UnboundedQueue
¶
Trio provides two types of queues suitable for different purposes. Where they differ is in their strategies for handling flow control. Here’s a toy example to demonstrate the problem. Suppose we have a queue with two producers and one consumer:
async def producer(queue):
while True:
await queue.put(1)
async def consumer(queue):
while True:
print(await queue.get())
async def main():
# Trio's actual queue classes have countermeasures to prevent
# this example from working, so imagine we have some sort of
# platonic ideal of a queue here
queue = trio.HypotheticalQueue()
async with trio.open_nursery() as nursery:
# Two producers
nursery.spawn(producer, queue)
nursery.spawn(producer, queue)
# One consumer
nursery.spawn(consumer, queue)
trio.run(main)
If we naively cycle between these three tasks in round-robin style, then we put an item, then put an item, then get an item, then put an item, then put an item, then get an item, ... and since on each cycle we add two items to the queue but only remove one, then over time the queue size grows arbitrarily large, our latency is terrible, we run out of memory, it’s just generally bad news all around.
There are two potential strategies for avoiding this problem.
The preferred solution is to apply backpressure. If our queue starts
getting too big, then we can make the producers slow down by having
put
block until get
has had a chance to remove an item. This
is the strategy used by trio.Queue
.
The other possibility is for the queue consumer to get greedy: each
time it runs, it could eagerly consume all of the pending items before
yielding and allowing another task to run. (In some other systems,
this would happen automatically because their queue’s get
method
doesn’t yield so long as there’s data available. But in trio,
get is always a yield point.) This would work, but
it’s a bit risky: basically instead of applying backpressure to
specifically the producer tasks, we’re applying it to all the tasks
in our system. The danger here is that if enough items have built up
in the queue, then “stopping the world” to process them all may cause
unacceptable latency spikes in unrelated tasks. Nonetheless, this is
still the right choice in situations where it’s impossible to apply
backpressure more precisely. For example, when monitoring exiting
tasks, blocking tasks from reporting their death doesn’t really
accomplish anything – the tasks are taking up memory either way,
etc. (In this particular case it might be possible to do better, but in general the
principle holds.) So this is the strategy implemented by
trio.UnboundedQueue
.
tl;dr: use Queue
if you can.
-
class
trio.
Queue
(capacity)¶ A bounded queue suitable for inter-task communication.
This class is generally modelled after
queue.Queue
, but with the major difference that it is always bounded. For an unbounded queue, seetrio.UnboundedQueue
.A
Queue
object can be used as an asynchronous iterator, that dequeues objects one at a time. I.e., these two loops are equivalent:async for obj in queue: ... while True: obj = await queue.get() ...
Parameters: capacity (int) – The maximum number of items allowed in the queue before put()
blocks. Choosing a sensible value here is important to ensure that backpressure is communicated promptly and avoid unnecessary latency. If in doubt, use 1.-
qsize
()¶ Returns the number of items currently in the queue.
There is some subtlety to interpreting this method’s return value: see issue #63.
-
full
()¶ Returns True if the queue is at capacity, False otherwise.
There is some subtlety to interpreting this method’s return value: see issue #63.
-
empty
()¶ Returns True if the queue is empty, False otherwise.
There is some subtlety to interpreting this method’s return value: see issue #63.
-
put_nowait
(obj)¶ Attempt to put an object into the queue, without blocking.
Parameters: obj (object) – The object to enqueue. Raises: WouldBlock
– if the queue is full.
-
await
put
(obj)¶ Put an object into the queue, blocking if necessary.
Parameters: obj (object) – The object to enqueue.
-
await
get_nowait
()¶ Attempt to get an object from the queue, without blocking.
Returns: The dequeued object. Return type: object Raises: WouldBlock
– if the queue is empty.
-
await
get
()¶ Get an object from the queue, blocking is necessary.
Returns: The dequeued object. Return type: object
-
await
task_done
()¶ Decrement the count of unfinished work.
Each
Queue
object keeps a count of unfinished work, which starts at zero and is incremented after each successfulput()
. This method decrements it again. When the count reaches zero, any tasks blocked injoin()
are woken.
-
await
join
()¶ Block until the count of unfinished work reaches zero.
See
task_done()
for details.
-
await
statistics
()¶ Returns an object containing debugging information.
Currently the following fields are defined:
qsize
: The number of items currently in the queue.capacity
: The maximum number of items the queue can hold.tasks_waiting_put
: The number of tasks blocked on this queue’sput()
method.tasks_waiting_get
: The number of tasks blocked on this queue’sget()
method.tasks_waiting_join
: The number of tasks blocked on this queue’sjoin()
method.
-
-
class
trio.
UnboundedQueue
¶ An unbounded queue suitable for certain unusual forms of inter-task communication.
This class is designed for use as a queue in cases where the producer for some reason cannot be subjected to back-pressure, i.e.,
put_nowait()
has to always succeed. In order to prevent the queue backlog from actually growing without bound, the consumer API is modified to dequeue items in “batches”. If a consumer task processes each batch without yielding, then this helps achieve (but does not guarantee) an effective bound on the queue’s memory use, at the cost of potentially increasing system latencies in general. You should generally prefer to use aQueue
instead if you can.Currently each batch completely empties the queue, but this may change in the future.
A
UnboundedQueue
object can be used as an asynchronous iterator, where each iteration returns a new batch of items. I.e., these two loops are equivalent:async for batch in queue: ... while True: obj = await queue.get_batch() ...
-
qsize
()¶ Returns the number of items currently in the queue.
-
empty
()¶ Returns True if the queue is empty, False otherwise.
There is some subtlety to interpreting this method’s return value: see issue #63.
-
put_nowait
(obj)¶ Put an object into the queue, without blocking.
This always succeeds, because the queue is unbounded. We don’t provide a blocking
put
method, because it would never need to block.Parameters: obj (object) – The object to enqueue.
-
get_batch_nowait
()¶ Attempt to get the next batch from the queue, without blocking.
Returns: - A list of dequeued items, in order. On a successful call this
- list is always non-empty; if it would be empty we raise
WouldBlock
instead.
Return type: list Raises: WouldBlock
– if the queue is empty.
-
await
get_batch
()¶ Get the next batch from the queue, blocking as necessary.
Returns: - A list of dequeued items, in order. This list is always
- non-empty.
Return type: list
-
await
statistics
()¶ Return an object containing debugging information.
Currently the following fields are defined:
qsize
: The number of items currently in the queue.tasks_waiting
: The number of tasks blocked on this queue’sget_batch()
method.
-
Lower-level synchronization primitives¶
Personally, I find that events and queues are usually enough to
implement most things I care about, and lead to easier to read code
than the lower-level primitives discussed in this section. But if you
need them, they’re here. (If you find yourself reaching for these
because you’re trying to implement a new higher-level synchronization
primitive, then you might also want to check out the facilities in
trio.hazmat
for a more direct exposure of trio’s underlying
synchronization logic. All of classes discussed in this section are
implemented on top of the public APIs in trio.hazmat
; they
don’t have any special access to trio’s internals.)
-
class
trio.
Semaphore
(initial_value, *, max_value=None)¶ A semaphore.
A semaphore holds an integer value, which can be incremented by calling
release()
and decremented by callingacquire()
– but the value is never allowed to drop below zero. If the value is zero, thenacquire()
will block until someone callsrelease()
.This is a very flexible synchronization object, but perhaps the most common use is to represent a resource with some bounded supply. For example, if you want to make sure that there are never more than four tasks simultaneously performing some operation, you could do something like:
# Allocate a shared Semaphore object, and somehow distribute it to all # your tasks. NB: max_value=4 isn't technically necessary, but can # help catch errors. sem = trio.Semaphore(4, max_value=4) # Then when you perform the operation: async with sem: await perform_operation()
This object’s interface is similar to, but different from, that of
threading.Semaphore
.A
Semaphore
object can be used as an async context manager; it blocks on entry but not on exit.Parameters: -
value
¶ The current value of the semaphore.
-
max_value
¶ The maximum allowed value. May be None to indicate no limit.
-
acquire_nowait
()¶ Attempt to decrement the semaphore value, without blocking.
Raises: WouldBlock
– if the value is zero.
-
await
acquire
()¶ Decrement the semaphore value, blocking if necessary to avoid letting it drop below zero.
-
await
release
()¶ Increment the semaphore value, possibly waking a task blocked in
acquire()
.Raises: ValueError
– if incrementing the value would cause it to exceedmax_value
.
-
-
class
trio.
Lock
¶ A classic mutex.
This is a non-reentrant, single-owner lock. Unlike
threading.Lock
, only the owner of the lock is allowed to release it.A
Lock
object can be used as an async context manager; it blocks on entry but not on exit.-
locked
()¶ Check whether the lock is currently held.
Returns: True if the lock is held, False otherwise. Return type: bool
-
acquire_nowait
()¶ Attempt to acquire the lock, without blocking.
Raises: WouldBlock
– if the lock is held.
-
await
acquire
()¶ Acquire the lock, blocking if necessary.
-
await
release
()¶ Release the lock.
Raises: RuntimeError
– if the calling task does not hold the lock.
-
await
statistics
()¶ Return an object containing debugging information.
Currently the following fields are defined:
-
-
class
trio.
Condition
(lock=None)¶ A classic condition variable, similar to
threading.Condition
.A
Condition
object can be used as an async context manager to acquire the underlying lock; it blocks on entry but not on exit.Parameters: lock (Lock) – the lock object to use. If given, must be a trio.Lock
. If None, a newLock
will be allocated and used.-
locked
()¶ Check whether the underlying lock is currently held.
Returns: True if the lock is held, False otherwise. Return type: bool
-
acquire_nowait
()¶ Attempt to acquire the underlying lock, without blocking.
Raises: WouldBlock
– if the lock is currently held.
-
await
acquire
()¶ Acquire the underlying lock, blocking if necessary.
-
await
release
()¶ Release the underlying lock.
-
await
wait
()¶ Wait for another thread to call
notify()
ornotify_all()
.When calling this method, you must hold the lock. It releases the lock while waiting, and then re-acquires it before waking up.
There is a subtlety with how this method interacts with cancellation: when cancelled it will block to re-acquire the lock before raising
Cancelled
. This may cause cancellation to be less prompt than expected. The advantage is that it makes code like this work:async with condition: await condition.wait()
If we didn’t re-acquire the lock before waking up, and
wait()
were cancelled here, then we’d crash incondition.__aexit__
when we tried to release the lock we no longer held.Raises: RuntimeError
– if the calling task does not hold the lock.
-
await
notify
(n=1)¶ Wake one or more tasks that are blocked in
wait()
.Parameters: n (int) – The number of tasks to wake. Raises: RuntimeError
– if the calling task does not hold the lock.
-
await
notify_all
()¶ Wake all tasks that are currently blocked in
wait()
.Raises: RuntimeError
– if the calling task does not hold the lock.
-
await
statistics
()¶ Return an object containing debugging information.
Currently the following fields are defined:
tasks_waiting
: The number of tasks blocked on this condition’swait()
method.lock_statistics
: The result of calling the underlyingLock
sstatistics()
method.
-
Threads (if you must)¶
In a perfect world, all third-party libraries and low-level APIs would be natively async and integrated into Trio, and all would be happiness and rainbows.
That world, alas, does not (yet) exist. Until it does, you may find yourself needing to interact with non-Trio APIs that do rude things like “blocking”.
In acknowledgment of this reality, Trio provides two useful utilities
for working with real, operating-system level,
threading
-module-style threads. First, if you’re in Trio but
need to push some work into a thread, there’s
run_in_worker_thread()
. And if you’re in a thread and need to
communicate back with trio, there’s the closely related
current_run_in_trio_thread()
and
current_await_in_trio_thread()
.
-
await
trio.
run_in_worker_thread
(sync_fn, *args, cancellable=False)¶ Convert a blocking operation in an async operation using a thread.
These two lines are equivalent:
sync_fn(*args) await run_in_worker_thread(sync_fn, *args)
except that if
sync_fn
takes a long time, then the first line will block the Trio loop while it runs, while the second line allows other Trio tasks to continue working whilesync_fn
runs. This is accomplished by pushing the call tosync_fn(*args)
off into a worker thread.Cancellation handling: Cancellation is a tricky issue here, because neither Python nor the operating systems it runs on provide any general way to communicate with an arbitrary synchronous function running in a thread and tell it to stop. This function will always check for cancellation on entry, before starting the thread. But once the thread is running, there are two ways it can handle being cancelled:
- If
cancellable=False
, the function ignores the cancellation and keeps going, just like if we had calledsync_fn
synchronously. This is the default behavior. - If
cancellable=True
, thenrun_in_worker_thread
immediately raisesCancelled
. In this case the thread keeps running in background – we just abandon it to do whatever it’s going to do, and silently discard any return value or errors that it raises. Only use this if you know that the operation is safe and side-effect free. (For example:trio.socket.getaddrinfo
is implemented usingrun_in_worker_thread()
, and it setscancellable=True
because it doesn’t really matter if a stray hostname lookup keeps running in the background.)
Warning
You should not use
run_in_worker_thread()
to call CPU-bound functions! In addition to the usual GIL-related reasons why using threads for CPU-bound work is not very effective in Python, there is an additional problem: on CPython, CPU-bound threads tend to “starve out” IO-bound threads, so usingrun_in_worker_thread()
for CPU-bound work is likely to adversely affect the main thread running trio. If you need to do this, you’re better off using a worker process, or perhaps PyPy (which still has a GIL, but may do a better job of fairly allocating CPU time between threads).Parameters: - sync_fn – An arbitrary synchronous callable.
- *args – Positional arguments to pass to sync_fn. If you need keyword
arguments, use
functools.partial()
. - cancellable (bool) – Whether to allow cancellation of this operation. See discussion above.
Returns: Whatever
sync_fn
returns.Raises: Whatever
sync_fn
raises.- If
-
trio.
current_run_in_trio_thread
()¶ -
trio.
current_await_in_trio_thread
()¶ Call these from inside a trio run to get a reference to the current run’s
run_in_trio_thread()
orawait_in_trio_thread()
:-
run_in_trio_thread
(sync_fn, *args)¶
-
await_in_trio_thread
(async_fn, *args)¶
These functions schedule a call to
sync_fn(*args)
orawait async_fn(*args)
to happen in the main trio thread, wait for it to complete, and then return the result or raise whatever exception it raised.These are the only non-hazmat functions that interact with the trio run loop and that can safely be called from a different thread than the one that called
trio.run()
. These two functions must be called from a different thread than the one that calledtrio.run()
. (After all, they’re blocking functions!)Warning
If the relevant call to
trio.run()
finishes while a call toawait_in_trio_thread
is in progress, then the call toasync_fn
will be cancelled and the resultingCancelled
exception may propagate out ofawait_in_trio_thread
and into the calling thread. You should be prepared for this.Raises: RunFinishedError – If the corresponding call to trio.run()
has already completed.-
This will probably be clearer with an example. Here we demonstrate how
to spawn a child thread, and then use a trio.Queue
to send
messages between the thread and a trio task:
import trio
import threading
def thread_fn(await_in_trio_thread, request_queue, response_queue):
while True:
# Since we're in a thread, we can't call trio.Queue methods
# directly -- so we use await_in_trio_thread to call them.
request = await_in_trio_thread(request_queue.get)
# We use 'None' as a request to quit
if request is not None:
response = request + 1
await_in_trio_thread(response_queue.put, response)
else:
# acknowledge that we're shutting down, and then do it
await_in_trio_thread(response_queue.put, None)
return
async def main():
# Get a reference to the await_in_trio_thread function
await_in_trio_thread = trio.current_await_in_trio_thread()
request_queue = trio.Queue(1)
response_queue = trio.Queue(1)
thread = threading.Thread(
target=thread_fn,
args=(await_in_trio_thread, request_queue, response_queue))
thread.start()
# prints "1"
await request_queue.put(0)
print(await response_queue.get())
# prints "2"
await request_queue.put(1)
print(await response_queue.get())
# prints "None"
await request_queue.put(None)
print(await response_queue.get())
thread.join()
trio.run(main)
Debugging and instrumentation¶
Trio tries hard to provide useful hooks for debugging and
instrumentation. Some are documented above (Task.name
,
Queue.statistics()
, etc.). Here are some more:
Global statistics¶
-
trio.
current_statistics
()¶ Returns an object containing run-loop-level debugging information.
Currently the following fields are defined:
tasks_living
(int): The number of tasks that have been spawned and not yet exited.tasks_runnable
(int): The number of tasks that are currently queued on the run queue (as opposed to blocked waiting for something to happen).seconds_to_next_deadline
(float): The time until the next pending cancel scope deadline. May be negative if the deadline has expired but we haven’t yet processed cancellations. May beinf
if there are no pending deadlines.call_soon_queue_size
(int): The number of unprocessed callbacks queued viatrio.hazmat.current_call_soon_thread_and_signal_safe()
.io_statistics
(object): Some statistics from trio’s I/O backend. This always has an attributebackend
which is a string naming which operating-system-specific I/O backend is in use; the other attributes vary between backends.
Instrument API¶
The instrument API provides a standard way to add custom instrumentation to the run loop. Want to make a histogram of scheduling latencies, log a stack trace of any task that blocks the run loop for >50 ms, or measure what percentage of your process’s running time is spent waiting for I/O? This is the place.
The general idea is that at any given moment, trio.run()
maintains a set of “instruments”, which are objects that implement the
trio.abc.Instrument
interface. When an interesting event
happens, it loops over these instruments and notifies them by calling
an appropriate method. The tutorial has a simple example of
using this for tracing.
Since this hooks into trio at a rather low level, you do have to be somewhat careful. The callbacks are run synchronously, and in many cases if they error out then we don’t have any plausible way to propagate this exception (for instance, we might be deep in the guts of the exception propagation machinery...). Therefore our current strategy for handling exceptions raised by instruments is to (a) dump a stack trace to stderr and (b) disable the offending instrument.
You can register an initial list of instruments by passing them to
trio.run()
. current_instruments()
lets you introspect and
modify this list at runtime from inside trio:
-
trio.
current_instruments
()¶ Returns the list of currently active instruments.
This list is live: if you mutate it, then
trio.run()
will stop calling the instruments you remove and start calling the ones you add.
And here’s the instrument API:
-
class
trio.abc.
Instrument
¶ The interface for run loop instrumentation.
Instruments don’t have to inherit from this abstract base class, and all of these methods are optional. This class serves mostly as documentation.
-
before_run
()¶ Called at the beginning of
trio.run()
.
-
after_run
()¶ Called just before
trio.run()
returns.
-
task_spawned
(task)¶ Called when the given task is created.
Parameters: task (trio.Task) – The new task.
-
task_scheduled
(task)¶ Called when the given task becomes runnable.
It may still be some time before it actually runs, if there are other runnable tasks ahead of it.
Parameters: task (trio.Task) – The task that became runnable.
-
before_task_step
(task)¶ Called immediately before we resume running the given task.
Parameters: task (trio.Task) – The task that is about to run.
-
after_task_step
(task)¶ Called when we return to the main run loop after a task has yielded.
Parameters: task (trio.Task) – The task that just ran.
-
task_exited
(task)¶ Called when the given task exits.
Parameters: task (trio.Task) – The finished task.
-
The tutorial has a fully-worked example of defining a custom instrument to log trio’s internal scheduling decisions.
Exceptions¶
-
exception
trio.
TrioInternalError
¶ Raised by
run()
if we encounter a bug in trio, or (possibly) a misuse of one of the low-leveltrio.hazmat
APIs.This should never happen! If you get this error, please file a bug.
Unfortunately, if you get this error it also means that all bets are off – trio doesn’t know what is going on and its normal invariants may be void. (For example, we might have “lost track” of a task. Or lost track of all tasks.) Again, though, this shouldn’t happen.
-
exception
trio.
Cancelled
¶ Raised by blocking calls if the surrounding scope has been cancelled.
You should let this exception propagate, to be caught by the relevant cancel scope. To remind you of this, it inherits from
BaseException
, likeKeyboardInterrupt
andSystemExit
.Note
In the US it’s also common to see this word spelled “canceled”, with only one “l”. This is a recent and US-specific innovation, and even in the US both forms are still commonly used. So for consistency with the rest of the world and with “cancellation” (which always has two “l”s), trio uses the two “l” spelling everywhere.
-
exception
trio.
TooSlowError
¶ Raised by
fail_after()
andfail_at()
if the timeout expires.
-
exception
trio.
WouldBlock
¶ Raised by
X_nowait
functions ifX
would block.
-
exception
trio.
RunFinishedError
¶ Raised by
run_in_trio_thread
and similar functions if the corresponding call totrio.run()
has already finished.