how to to terminate process using python's multiprocessing

Question

I have some code that needs to run against several other systems that may hang or have problems not under my control. I would like to use python's multiprocessing to spawn child processes to run independent of the main program and then when they hang or have problems terminate them, but I am not sure of the best way to go about this.

When terminate is called it does kill the child process, but then it becomes a defunct zombie that is not released until the process object is gone. The example code below where the loop never ends works to kill it and allow a respawn when called again, but does not seem like a good way of going about this (ie multiprocessing.Process() would be better in the __init__()).

Anyone have a suggestion?

class Process(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.thing = Thing()
        self.running_flag = multiprocessing.Value("i", 1)

    def run(self):
        self.process = multiprocessing.Process(target=self.thing.worker, args=(self.running_flag,))
        self.process.start()
        print self.process.pid

    def pause_resume(self):
        self.running_flag.value = not self.running_flag.value

    def terminate(self):
        self.process.terminate()

class Thing(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.count = 1

    def worker(self,running_flag):
        while True:
            if running_flag.value:
                self.do_work()

    def do_work(self):
        print "working {0} ...".format(self.count)
        self.count += 1
        time.sleep(1)

Answer 1

The way Python multiprocessing handles processes is a bit confusing.

From the multiprocessing guidelines:

Joining zombie processes

On Unix when a process finishes but has not been joined it becomes a zombie. There should never be very many because each time a new process starts (or active_children() is called) all completed processes which have not yet been joined will be joined. Also calling a finished process’s Process.is_alive will join the process. Even so it is probably good practice to explicitly join all the processes that you start.

In order to avoid a process to become a zombie, you need to call it's join() method once you kill it.

If you want a simpler way to deal with the hanging calls in your system you can take a look at pebble.