Wow -- I just saw the notes for 16264 <https://github.com/grpc/grpc/pull/16264>, and that 1.15 now supports fork() in Python. This is huge and great news!
I just want to make sure I understand how this change works, and in particular what the consequences of the shutdown of the core-level gRPC resources in the child's post-fork handler means. The use case which is (IMO) most important is where you create some kind of Python object which has a gRPC stub inside it (e.g., a client object meant to talk to servers), then fork() (often through use of the core Python multiprocessing library), and use that object from within the child process as well. (This is important because the multiprocessing library is the only built-in parallelization mechanism that doesn't suffer from serialization due to the GIL) The overhead cost, IIUC, would be essentially a restart of the core resources, which is roughly equivalent to the cost of closing and reopening the channel, but *not* of having to reboot all the wrapping objects, like bigtable clients or whatever. (Which are notoriously slow to start up because they also want to look up all sorts of metadata from the server when they boot) I could imagine several gotchas here: for example, that the cancellation of in-flight RPC's by the child during the reboot would also affect RPC's in flight due to other threads, meaning that the client object has to be entirely idle during the fork process. Am I understanding the new change correctly? What are the intended use cases that it's meant to unlock? Yonatan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "grpc.io" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/grpc-io. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/grpc-io/CAFk%3DnbRKa2oEKjdvuwA6fbFCaxZ9JBYa1QcDqoSGEowwfP9tNQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
