multiprocessing: child process race to answer

[William Ray Wing]

On Nov 2, 2013, at 1:03 AM, smhall05 <smhall05 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, November 1, 2013 10:52:40 PM UTC-4, MRAB wrote:
>> On 02/11/2013 02:35, smhall05 wrote:
>> 
>>> I am using a basic multiprocessing snippet I found:
>>> 
>>> #-----------------------------------------------------
>>> from multiprocessing import Pool
>>> 
>>> def  f(x):
>>>     return x*x
>>> 
>>> if __name__ == '__main__':
>>>     pool = Pool(processes=4)              # start 4 worker processes
>>>     result = pool.apply_async(f, [10])    # evaluate "f(10)" asynchronously
>>>     print result.get(timeout=1)
>>>     print pool.map(f, range(10))          # prints "[0, 1, 4,..., 81]"
>>> #---------------------------------------------------------
>>> 
>>> I am using this code to have each process go off and solve the same problem, just with different inputs to the problem. I need to be able to kill all processes once 1 of n processes has come up with the solution. There will only be one answer.
>>> 
>>> I have tried:
>>> 
>>> sys.exit(0) #this causes the program to hang
>>> pool.close()
>>> pool.terminate
>>> 
>> 
>> Did you actually mean "pool.terminate", or is that a typo for
>> 
>> "pool.terminate()"?
>> 
>>> These still allow further processing before the program terminates. What else can I try? I am not able to share the exact code at this time. I can provide more detail if I am unclear. Thank you
>>> 
> 
> I am not sure to be honest, however it turns out that I can't use pool.terminate() because pool is defined in main and not accessible under my def in which I check for the correct answer.
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

So, the simplest solution to that situation is to have whichever subprocess that finds the correct answer set a flag which the calling process can check.  Depending on your OS, that flag can be anything from setting a lock to something as simple as creating a file which the calling process periodically wakes up and looks for, maybe just a file in which the subprocess has written the answer.

Bill