How to use multiprocessing queue in Python

Question

I'm having much trouble trying to understand just how the multiprocessing queue works on python and how to implement it. Lets say I have two python modules that access data from a shared file, let's call these two modules a writer and a reader. My plan is to have both the reader and writer put requests into two separate multiprocessing queues, and then have a third process pop these requests in a loop and execute as such.

My main problem is that I really don't know how to implement multiprocessing.queue correctly, you cannot really instantiate the object for each process since they will be separate queues, how do you make sure that all processes relate to a shared queue.

Answer 1

This is a simple example of a reader and writer sharing a single queue... The writer sends a bunch of integers to the reader; when the writer runs out of numbers, it sends 'DONE', which lets the reader know to break out of the read loop.

from multiprocessing import Process, Queue
import time
import sys

def reader_proc(queue):
    ## Read from the queue; this will be spawned as a separate Process
    while True:
        msg = queue.get()         # Read from the queue and do nothing
        if (msg == 'DONE'):
            break

def writer(count, queue):
    ## Write to the queue
    for ii in range(0, count):
        queue.put(ii)             # Write 'count' numbers into the queue
    queue.put('DONE')

if __name__=='__main__':
    pqueue = Queue() # writer() writes to pqueue from _this_ process
    for count in [10**4, 10**5, 10**6]:             
        ### reader_proc() reads from pqueue as a separate process
        reader_p = Process(target=reader_proc, args=((pqueue),))
        reader_p.daemon = True
        reader_p.start()        # Launch reader_proc() as a separate python process

        _start = time.time()
        writer(count, pqueue)    # Send a lot of stuff to reader()
        reader_p.join()         # Wait for the reader to finish
        print("Sending {0} numbers to Queue() took {1} seconds".format(count,
            (time.time() - _start)))