Magic decorator syntax for asynchronous code in Python
Tomorrow is conveniently available via pip:
pip install tomorrow
or installable via git clone
and setup.py
git clone git@github.com:madisonmay/Tomorrow.git
sudo python setup.py install
The tomorrow library enables you to utilize the benefits of multi-threading with minimal concern about the implementation details.
Behind the scenes, the library is a thin wrapper around the Future
object in concurrent.futures
that resolves the Future
whenever you try to access any of its attributes.
Enough of the implementation details, let's take a look at how simple it is to speed up an inefficient chunk of blocking code with minimal effort.
You've collected a list of urls and are looking to download the HTML of the lot. The following is a perfectly reasonable first stab at solving the task.
For the following examples, we'll be using the top sites from the Alexa rankings.
urls = [
'http://google.com',
'http://facebook.com',
'http://youtube.com',
'http://baidu.com',
'http://yahoo.com',
]
Right then, let's get on to the code.
import time
import requests
def download(url):
return requests.get(url)
if __name__ == "__main__":
start = time.time()
responses = [download(url) for url in urls]
html = [response.text for response in responses]
end = time.time()
print "Time: %f seconds" % (end - start)
Using tomorrow's decorator syntax, we can define a function that executes in multiple threads. Individual calls to download
are non-blocking, but we can largely ignore this fact and write code identically to how we would in a synchronous paradigm.
import time
import requests
from tomorrow import threads
@threads(5)
def download(url):
return requests.get(url)
if __name__ == "__main__":
start = time.time()
responses = [download(url) for url in urls]
html = [response.text for response in responses]
end = time.time()
print "Time: %f seconds" % (end - start)
Awesome! With a single line of additional code (and no explicit threading logic) we can now download websites ~10x as efficiently.
You can also optionally pass in a timeout argument, to prevent hanging on a task that is not guaranteed to return.
import time
from tomorrow import threads
@threads(1, timeout=0.1)
def raises_timeout_error():
time.sleep(1)
if __name__ == "__main__":
print raises_timeout_error()
Feel free to read the source for a peek behind the scenes -- it's less than 50 lines of code.