I'm trying to use multiprocessing
's Pool.map()
function to divide out work simultaneously. When I use the following code, it works fine:
import multiprocessing
def f(x):
return x*x
def go():
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=4)
print pool.map(f, range(10))
if __name__== '__main__' :
go()
However, when I use it in a more object-oriented approach, it doesn't work. The error message it gives is:
PicklingError: Can't pickle <type 'instancemethod'>: attribute lookup
__builtin__.instancemethod failed
This occurs when the following is my main program:
import someClass
if __name__== '__main__' :
sc = someClass.someClass()
sc.go()
and the following is my someClass
class:
import multiprocessing
class someClass(object):
def __init__(self):
pass
def f(self, x):
return x*x
def go(self):
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=4)
print pool.map(self.f, range(10))
Anyone know what the problem could be, or an easy way around it?
The problem is that multiprocessing must pickle things to sling them among processes, and bound methods are not picklable. The workaround (whether you consider it "easy" or not;-) is to add the infrastructure to your program to allow such methods to be pickled, registering it with the copy_reg standard library method.
For example, Steven Bethard's contribution to this thread (towards the end of the thread) shows one perfectly workable approach to allow method pickling/unpickling via copy_reg
.