Burner Process

Burner Process is a wrapper that runs a function inside a newly spawned independent process that is not child to the main process, handling the function's arguments and returns (via pickle) as well as all its dependencies.

Other solutions (such as this one) rely on subprocess and thus spawn a process that is child to the main process, sharing memory and resources with it. Burner Process comes in handy when you need to run a function in an isolated environment, as a 'hard' workaround to memory leaks or inside parallel sub-processes, to monitor a specific function's resources usage.

Limitations

• The function has to be defined in a module different from the main, and the functions's module must not include importing burner_process (see example below), which would cause circular imports.
• Both arguments and returns must be pickleable
  

Features

• Supporting overlapping/parallel calls
  
• Not relying on subprocess nor multiprocessing
  
• Not relying on a queue for the returns
  
• Tested on Windows and Linux

Usage

Installation

pip install burner-process

Example

my_module.py

def my_function(x):
    return x * 2

my_script.py

from burner_process import processify
from my_module import my_function

my_function_p = processify(my_function)
my_function_p(5)

>> 10

Verbose example

my_module.py

def my_function(x):
    return x * 2

my_script.py

from burner_process import processify
from my_module import my_function

my_function_p = processify(my_function, verbose=True)
my_function_p(5)

>> Launching from main process (pid: 20124, parent pid: 10568)
>> Serializing arguments to C:\...\io\3
>> Running inside spawned process (pid: 18976, parent pid: 14584)
>> Serializing outputs to C:\...\io\3
>> 10