When should we call multiprocessing.Pool.join?

Question

I am using 'multiprocess.Pool.imap_unordered' as following

from multiprocessing import Pool
pool = Pool()
for mapped_result in pool.imap_unordered(mapping_func, args_iter):
    do some additional processing on mapped_result

Do I need to call pool.close or pool.join after the for loop?

Solution

No, you don't, but it's probably a good idea if you aren't going to use the pool anymore.

Reasons for calling pool.close or pool.join are well said by Tim Peters in this SO post:

As to Pool.close(), you should call that when - and only when - you're never going to submit more work to the Pool instance. So Pool.close() is typically called when the parallelizable part of your main program is finished. Then the worker processes will terminate when all work already assigned has completed.

It's also excellent practice to call Pool.join() to wait for the worker processes to terminate. Among other reasons, there's often no good way to report exceptions in parallelized code (exceptions occur in a context only vaguely related to what your main program is doing), and Pool.join() provides a synchronization point that can report some exceptions that occurred in worker processes that you'd otherwise never see.

Comments

[RSHAP]

is it better to call one before the other?

[Bamcclur]

It seems that people like to call pool.close() first and pool.join() second. This allows for you to add work between the pool.close() and pool.join() that doesn't need to wait for the pool to finish executing.

[Bogd]

Just to add to @Bamcclur's comment - it's not just a good idea to call pool.close() first, it's actually mandatory. From the docs : One must call close() or terminate() before using join().

[agdhruv]

@Bogd But why is it mandatory? Could you answer this question, please?

[Whip]

An answer to agdhruvs question would be awesome!