Python: concurrent.futures How to make it cancelable?

Question

Python concurrent.futures and ProcessPoolExecutor provide a neat interface to schedule and monitor tasks. Futures even provide a .cancel() method:

Answer 1

I don't know why concurrent.futures.Future does not have a .kill() method, but you can accomplish what you want by shutting down the process pool with pool.shutdown(wait=False), and killing the remaining child processes by hand.

Create a function for killing child processes:

import signal, psutil

def kill_child_processes(parent_pid, sig=signal.SIGTERM):
    try:
        parent = psutil.Process(parent_pid)
    except psutil.NoSuchProcess:
        return
    children = parent.children(recursive=True)
    for process in children:
        process.send_signal(sig)

Run your code until you get the first result, then kill all remaining child processes:

from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor, FIRST_COMPLETED, wait

# function that profits from partitioned search space
def m_run(partition):
    for elem in partition:
        if elem == 135135515:
            return elem
    return False

futures = []
# used to create the partitions
steps = 100000000
pool = ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=4)
for i in range(4):
    # run 4 tasks with a partition, but only *one* solution is needed
    partition = range(i*steps,(i+1)*steps)
    futures.append(pool.submit(m_run, partition))

done, not_done = wait(futures, timeout=3600, return_when=FIRST_COMPLETED)

# Shut down pool
pool.shutdown(wait=False)

# Kill remaining child processes
kill_child_processes(os.getpid())