Entries tagged with gevent
AsyncIO
I'd like to put forth my current thinking about asyncio. I hope this will answer some of the questions I've received as to whether Peewee will one day support asyncio, but moreso I hope it will encourage some readers (especially in the web development crowd) to question whether asyncio is appropriate for their project, and if so, look into alternatives like gevent.
Write your own miniature Redis with Python
The other day the idea occurred to me that it would be neat to write a simple Redis-like database server. While I've had plenty of experience with WSGI applications, a database server presented a novel challenge and proved to be a nice practical way of learning how to work with sockets in Python. In this post I'll share what I learned along the way.
The goal of my project was to write a simple server that I could use with a task queue project of mine called huey. Huey uses Redis as the default storage engine for tracking enqueued jobs, results of finished jobs, and other things. For the purposes of this post, I've reduced the scope of the original project even further so as not to muddy the waters with code you could very easily write yourself, but if you're curious, you can check out the end result here (documentation).
The server we'll be building will be able to respond to the following commands:
- GET
<key> - SET
<key><value> - DELETE
<key> - FLUSH
- MGET
<key1>...<keyn> - MSET
<key1><value1>...<keyn><valuen>
We'll support the following data-types as well:
- Strings and Binary Data
- Numbers
- NULL
- Arrays (which may be nested)
- Dictionaries (which may be nested)
- Error messages
Ditching the Task Queue for Gevent
Task queues are frequently deployed alongside websites to do background processing outside the normal request/response cycle. In the past I've used them for things like sending emails, generating thumbnails, warming caches, or periodically fetching remote resources. By pushing that work out of the request/response cycle, you can increase the throughput (and responsiveness) of your web application.
Depending on your workload, though, it may be possible to move your task processing into the same process as your web server. In this post I'll describe how I did just that using gevent, though the technique would probably work well with a number of different WSGI servers.