Consuming Tasks
To run the consumer, simply point it at the “import path” to your application’s
Huey instance. For example, here is how I run it on my blog:
huey_consumer.py blog.main.huey --logfile=../logs/huey.log
The concept of the “import path” has been the source of a few questions, but its
actually quite simple. It is simply the dotted-path you might use if you were
to try and import the “huey” object in the interactive interpreter:
>>> from blog.main import huey
You may run into trouble though when “blog” is not on your python-path. To
work around this:
- Manually specify your pythonpath: PYTHONPATH=/some/dir/:$PYTHONPATH huey_consumer.py blog.main.huey.
- Run huey_consumer.py from the directory your config module is in. I use
supervisord to manage my huey process, so I set the directory to the root
of my site.
- Create a wrapper and hack sys.path.
Options for the consumer
The following table lists the options available for the consumer as well as
their default values.
- -l, --logfile
- Path to file used for logging. When a file is specified, by default Huey
will use a rotating file handler (1MB / chunk) with a maximum of 3 backups.
You can attach your own handler (huey.logger) as well. The default
loglevel is INFO.
- -v, --verbose
Verbose logging (equates to DEBUG level). If no logfile is specified
and verbose is set, then the consumer will log to the console. This is
very useful for testing/debugging.
- -q, --quiet
- Only log errors. The default loglevel for the consumer is INFO.
- -w, --workers
- Number of worker threads, the default is 1 thread but for applications
that have many I/O bound tasks, increasing this number may lead to greater
throughput.
- -p, --periodic
- Indicate that this consumer process should start a thread dedicated to
enqueueing “periodic” tasks (crontab-like functionality). This defaults
to True, so should not need to be specified in practice.
- -n, --no-periodic
- Indicate that this consumer process should not enqueue periodic tasks.
- -d, --delay
- When using a “polling”-type queue backend, the amount of time to wait
between polling the backend. Default is 0.1 seconds.
- -m, --max-delay
- The maximum amount of time to wait between polling, if using weighted
backoff. Default is 10 seconds.
- -b, --backoff
- The amount to back-off when polling for results. Must be greater than
one. Default is 1.15.
- -u, --utc
- Indicates that the consumer should use UTC time for all tasks, crontabs
and scheduling. Default is True, so in practice you should not need to
specify this option.
- --localtime
- Indicates that the consumer should use localtime for all tasks, crontabs
and scheduling. Default is False.
Examples
Running the consumer with 8 threads, a logfile for errors only, and a very
short polling interval:
huey_consumer.py my.app.huey -l /var/log/app.huey.log -w 8 -b 1.1 -m 1.0
Running single-threaded without a crontab and logging to stdout:
huey_consumer.py my.app.huey -v -n
Consumer Internals
The consumer is composed of 3 types of threads:
- Worker threads
- Scheduler
- Periodic task scheduler (optional)
These threads coordinate the receipt, execution and scheduling of various
tasks. What happens when you call a decorated function in your application?
- You call a function – huey has decorated it, which triggers a message being
put into the queue. At this point your application returns. If you are using
a “data store”, then you will be return an AsyncData object.
- In a separate process, the consumer will be listening for new messages –
one of the worker threads will pull down the message. If your backend supports
blocking, it will block until a new message is available, otherwise it will
poll.
- The worker looks at the message and checks to see if it can be
run (i.e., was this message “revoked”? Is it scheduled to actually run
later?). If it is revoked, the message is thrown out. If it is scheduled
to run later, it gets added to the schedule. Otherwise, it is executed.
- The worker thread executes the task. If the task finishes, any results are
published to the result store (if one is configured). If the task fails and
can be retried, it is either enqueued or added to the schedule (which happens
if a delay is specified between retries).
While all this is going on, the Scheduler thread is continually looking at
its schedule to see if any commands are ready to be executed. If a command
is ready to run, it is enqueued and will be processed by the Message receiver
thread.
Similarly, the Periodic task thread will run every minute to see if there are
any regularly-scheduled tasks to run at that time. Those tasks will be enqueued
and processed by the Message receiver thread.
When the consumer is shut-down (SIGTERM) it will save the schedule and finish
any jobs that are currently being worked on.
Consumer Event Emitter
If you specify a RedisEventEmitter when setting up your Huey
instance (or if you choose to use RedisHuey), the consumer will publish
real-time events about the status of various tasks. You can subscribe to these
events in your own application.
When an event is emitted, the following information is provided (serialized as
JSON):
status: a String indicating what type of event this is.
id: the UUID of the task.
task: a user-friendly name indicating what type of task this is.
retries: how many retries the task has remaining.
retry_delay: how long to sleep before retrying the task in event of failure.
- execute_time: A unix timestamp indicating when the task is scheduled to
execute (this may be None).
error: A boolean value indicating if there was an error.
traceback: A string traceback of the error, if one occurred.
The following events are emitted by the consumer:
enqueued: sent when a task is enqueued.
- scheduled: sent when a task is added to the schedule for execution in
the future.
revoked: sent when a task is not executed because it has been revoked.
started: sent when a worker thread begins executing a task.
- finished: sent when a worker thread finishes executing a task and has
stored the result.
error: sent when an exception occurs while executing a task.
retrying: sent when retrying a task that failed.