I just want to add that an implicitly persistent server might be a hotbed for nondeterministic behaviors, especially when the background server has an arbitrary shutdown timeout. I think it's nice to have something like this when users *explicitly* ask for it.
Tian On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 8:08 AM Nicholas Chammas <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Jun 21, 2026, at 5:45 PM, Holden Karau <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > I have mixed feelings about starting a persistent server perhaps > unexpectedly especially since if it gets in a bad state (say driver JVM > thrashjng on GC) a reasonable user might restart their Python process and > expect it to also kill the server (as it has done until now). > > > > Not saying I’m against this yet just there’s some downsides with > changing a default like this and we’d probably want to be careful with > messaging to users so they don’t get stuck / surpised (and give clear > instructions when connecting to an existing server etc). > > A weaker but still useful solution is to add the Connect server management > CLI along with documentation in the user guide, and have `.remote(“local”)` > have a way to automatically discover and connect to an existing server > without doing anything to the running server itself. > > A stronger solution would extend this approach by having the call to > `.remote(…).getOrCreate()` start a server if one isn’t already running, or > restart it if it’s running but fails some kind of health check. > > In both cases we would want to perhaps print some INFO-level log messages > about whether a server was found, started, or restarted. > > Nick > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe e-mail: [email protected] > >
