Python: Something like `map` that works on threads

Question

I was sure there was something like this in the standard library, but it seems I was wrong.

I have a bunch of urls that I want to urlopen in parallel. I want something like the builtin map function, except the work is done in parallel by a bunch of threads.

Is there a good module that does this?

Solution 1

Someone recommended I use the futures package for this. I tried it and it seems to be working.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/futures

Here's an example:

"Download many URLs in parallel."

import functools
import urllib.request
import futures

URLS = ['http://www.foxnews.com/',
        'http://www.cnn.com/',
        'http://europe.wsj.com/',
        'http://www.bbc.co.uk/',
        'http://some-made-up-domain.com/']

def load_url(url, timeout):
    return urllib.request.urlopen(url, timeout=timeout).read()

with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(50) as executor:
   future_list = executor.run_to_futures(
           [functools.partial(load_url, url, 30) for url in URLS])

Solution 2

There is a map method in multiprocessing.Pool. That does multiple processes.

And if multiple processes aren't your dish, you can use multiprocessing.dummy which uses threads.

import urllib
import multiprocessing.dummy

p = multiprocessing.dummy.Pool(5)
def f(post):
    return urllib.urlopen('http://stackoverflow.com/questions/%u' % post)

print p.map(f, range(3329361, 3329361 + 5))

Solution 3

Here is my implementation of threaded map:

from threading import Thread
from queue import Queue

def thread_map(f, iterable, pool=None):
    """
    Just like [f(x) for x in iterable] but each f(x) in a separate thread.
    :param f: f
    :param iterable: iterable
    :param pool: thread pool, infinite by default
    :return: list if results
    """
    res = {}
    if pool is None:
        def target(arg, num):
            try:
                res[num] = f(arg)
            except:
                res[num] = sys.exc_info()

        threads = [Thread(target=target, args=[arg, i]) for i, arg in enumerate(iterable)]
    else:
        class WorkerThread(Thread):
            def run(self):
                while True:
                    try:
                        num, arg = queue.get(block=False)
                        try:
                            res[num] = f(arg)
                        except:
                            res[num] = sys.exc_info()
                    except Empty:
                        break

        queue = Queue()
        for i, arg in enumerate(iterable):
            queue.put((i, arg))

        threads = [WorkerThread() for _ in range(pool)]

    [t.start() for t in threads]
    [t.join() for t in threads]
    return [res[i] for i in range(len(res))]

Solution 4

The Python module Queue might help you. Use one thread that uses Queue.put() to push all urls into the queue and the worker threads simply get() the urls one by one.

Python Docs: queue — A synchronized queue class

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