asyncio question

[Frank Millman]

"Ian Kelly"  wrote in message 
news:CALwzid=vdczAH18mHKaL7ryvDUB=7_y-JVUrTkRZ=Gkz66PV3g at mail.gmail.com...
>
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 6:15 AM, Frank Millman <frank at chagford.com> wrote:
> > The client uses AJAX to send messages to the server. It sends the 
> > message
> > and continues processing, while a background task waits for the response 
> > and
> > handles it appropriately. As a result, the client can send a second 
> > message
> > before receiving a response to the first one. The server can detect 
> > this,
> > but it cannot wait for the first message to complete, otherwise it will
> > block other clients. I have not noticed any problems with processing 2
> > requests from the same client concurrently, but I don't like it, so I 
> > want
> > to process them sequentially.
>
> Is there a particular reason why you're worried about this? The
> browser is perfectly capable of keeping the requests straight. Also,
> note that since the requests use separate HTTP connections, even if
> the server sends its responses in a particular order, there's no
> guarantee that the client will read them in that order, so this
> doesn't free you from the need to allow the client to handle the
> requests coming back in any order.
>

I had not thought of that, thanks. In fact, more to the point in my case, I 
assume that there is no guarantee that the server will receive the requests 
in the same order that the client sends them.

The particular reason for my concern was that each request can change the 
state of the session, and I wanted to be sure that the state has been fully 
updated before processing the next request.

One scenario, that I had not thought of, is that the requests could be 
received out of sequence. I don't think this will be a problem, but I will 
have to think about it.

The second scenario, which was my main concern, is that the server starts 
processing the second request before processing of the first request has 
been completed, meaning that the session data may not be in a stable state. 
My proposed solution solves this problem.

>
> In a 64-bit Linux build of CPython, the combined size of a generator
> and a stack frame is around half a kilobyte (not including whatever
> space is needed for local variables), so hundreds of yielding asyncio
> tasks should consume no more than hundreds of kilobytes of memory.
> Remember that half a kilobyte figure is per generator, not per task,
> so if your while loop is four coroutines deep, that will inflate the
> cost of the task to two kilobytes each. This is different from the
> threading model where each thread would need its own separate stack
> space, not just a frame on the heap; you probably wouldn't want to do
> this with threads, but with coroutines it should be fine.
>

Good to know, thanks. I will proceed on the assumption that if anyone runs 
my system with hundreds of users, they will run it on some serious hardware, 
so I should be safe.

Frank