asyncio - run coroutine in the background

[Frank Millman]

"Kevin Conway"  wrote in message 
news:CAKF=+dhXZ=yax8STAWr_gjX3Tg8yUjPRJG-7yM2_bRV2Kxm3Jg at mail.gmail.com...
>
> > My background task does take a long time to run - about 10 seconds - but
> > most of that time is spent waiting for database responses, which is 
> > handled
> > in another thread.
>
> Something else to look into is an asyncio driver for your database
> connections. Threads aren't inherently harmful, but using them to achieve
> async networking when running asyncio is a definite code smell since that
> is precisely the problem asyncio is supposed to solve for.
>

Maybe I have not explained very well. I am not using threads to achieve 
async networking. I am using asyncio in a client server environment, and it 
works very well. If a client request involves a database query, I use a 
thread to perform that so that it does not slow down the other users. I 
usually want the originating client to block until I have a response, so I 
use 'await'. However, occasionally the request takes some time, and it is 
not necessary for the client to wait for the response, so I want to unblock 
the client straight away, run the task in the background, and then notify 
the client when the task is complete. This is where your suggestion of 
'ensure_future' does the job perfectly.

I would love to drive the database asynchronously, but of the three 
databases I use, only psycopg2 seems to have asyncio support. As my 
home-grown solution (using queues) seems to be working well so far, I am 
sticking with that until I start to experience responsiveness issues. If 
that happens, my first line of attack will be to switch from threads to 
processes.

Hope this makes sense.

Frank