Async client for PostgreSQL?

[Werner Thie]

On 9/1/12 9:28 AM, Laszlo Nagy wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> does running on tornado imply that you would not consider twisted
>> http://twistedmatrix.com ?
>>
>> If not, twisted has exactly this capability hiding long running
>> queries on whatever db's behind deferToThread().
> All right, I was reading its documentation
>
> http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/10.1.0/api/twisted.internet.threads.deferToThread.html
>
>
> It doesn't tell too much about it: "Run a function in a thread and
> return the result as a Deferred.".
>
> Run a function but in what thread? Does it create a new thread for every
> invocation? In that case, I don't want to use this. My example case: 10%
> from 100 requests/second deal with a database. But it does not mean that
> one db-related request will do a single db API call only. They will
> almost always do more: start transaction, parse and open query, fetch
> with cursor, close query, open another query etc. then commit
> transaction. 8 API calls to do a quick fetch + update (usually under
> 100msec, but it might be blocked by another transaction for a while...)
> So we are talking about 80 database API calls per seconds at least. It
> would be insane to initialize a new thread for each invocation. And
> wrapping these API calls into a single closure function is not useful
> either, because that function would not be able to safely access the
> state that is stored in the main thread. Unless you protet it with
> locks. But it is whole point of async I/O server: to avoid using slow
> locks, expensive threads and context switching.
>
> Maybe, deferToThread uses a thread pool? But it doesn't say much about
> it. (Am I reading the wrong documentation?) BTW I could try a version
> that uses a thread pool.
>
> It is sad, by the way. We have async I/O servers for Python that can be
> used for large number of clients, but most external modules/extensions
> do not support their I/O loops. Including the extension modules of the
> most popular databases. So yes, you can use Twisted or torandoweb until
> you do not want to call *some* API functions that are blocking. (By
> *some* I mean: much less blocking than non-blocking, but quite a few.)
> We also have synchronous Python servers, but we cannot get rid of the
> GIL, Python threads are expensive and slow, so they cannot be used for a
> large number of clients. And finally, we have messaging services/IPC
> like zeromq. They are probably the most expensive, but they scale very
> well. But you need more money to operate the underlying hardware. I'm
> starting to think that I did not get a quick answer because my use case
> (100 clients) fall into to the "heavy weight" category, and the solution
> is to invest more in the hardware. :-)
>
> Thanks,
>
>     Laszlo
>

Laszlo:

Hmm, I was suggesting that you could replace the whole DB driver with a 
webservice implemented with twisted, if you rule out threads then with 
ampoule doing it with a process pool and consume this webservice with 
the tornado side asynchronously.

production level example thread pool based DB API:
Just to give you some ballpark figures, I'm running a game server with a 
daily peak of about 1500 parallel permanent connections and 50k games 
played every day (avg game duration 13min, peak request frequency close 
to 100req/sec) with a lot of statistics going into a MySQL DB on US$2k 
worth of hardware. Twisted as basis sitting atop FreeBSD, started the 
latest version in March, its running since then, no restarts, no 
reboots, no problems.

production level example process pool based PDF production:
Or for another implementation I'm running a webservice based PDF 
production (probably as blocking as services can come) for a Java based 
business app with twisted/ampoule, this is as stable as the game server.

HTH, Werner