Can t pickle type instancemethod when using multiprocessing Pool map

Question

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  lt type  instancemethod  gt   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

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Update  as of the day of this writing  namedTuples are pickable  starting with python 2 7    The issue here is the child processes aren t able to import the class of the object -in this case  the class P-  in the case of a multi-model project the Class P should be importable anywhere the child process get used  a quick workaround is to make it importable by affecting it to globals    globals    P     P

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You could also define a   call     method inside your someClass    which calls someClass go   and then pass an instance of someClass   to the pool  This object is pickleable and it works fine  for me

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I ran into this same issue but found out that there is a JSON encoder that can be used to move these objects between processes   from pyVmomi VmomiSupport import VmomiJSONEncoder   Use this to create your list   jsonSerialized   json dumps pfVmomiObj  cls VmomiJSONEncoder    Then in the mapped function  use this to recover the object   pfVmomiObj   json loads jsonSerialized

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You could also define a   call     method inside your someClass    which calls someClass go   and then pass an instance of someClass   to the pool  This object is pickleable and it works fine  for me      class someClass object      def   init   self          pass    def f self  x          return x x     def go self         p   Pool 4        sc   p map self  range 4         print sc     def   call   self  x           return self f x   sc   someClass   sc go

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A potentially trivial solution to this is to switch to using multiprocessing dummy  This is a thread based implementation of the multiprocessing interface that doesn t seem to have this problem in Python 2 7  I don t have a lot of experience here  but this quick import change allowed me to call apply async on a class method   A few good resources on multiprocessing dummy   https   docs python org 2 library multiprocessing html module-multiprocessing dummy  http   chriskiehl com article parallelism-in-one-line

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In this simple case  where someClass f is not inheriting any data from the class and not attaching anything to the class  a possible solution would be to separate out f  so it can be pickled   import multiprocessing   def f x       return x x   class someClass object       def   init   self           pass      def go self           pool   multiprocessing Pool processes 4                 print pool map f  range 10

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There s another short-cut you can use  although it can be inefficient depending on what s in your class instances   As everyone has said the problem is that the multiprocessing code has to pickle the things that it sends to the sub-processes it has started  and the pickler doesn t do instance-methods   However  instead of sending the instance-method  you can send the actual class instance  plus the name of the function to call  to an ordinary function that then uses getattr to call the instance-method  thus creating the bound method in the Pool subprocess   This is similar to defining a   call   method except that you can call more than one member function   Stealing  EricH  s code from his answer and annotating it a bit  I retyped it hence all the name changes and such  for some reason this seemed easier than cut-and-paste  -    for illustration of all the magic   import multiprocessing import os  def call it instance  name  args     kwargs None        indirect caller for instance methods and multiprocessing      if kwargs is None          kwargs          return getattr instance  name   args    kwargs   class Klass object       def   init   self  nobj  workers multiprocessing cpu count             print  Constructor  in pid  d        os getpid           self count   1         pool   multiprocessing Pool processes   workers          async results    pool apply async call it              args    self   process obj    i     for i in range nobj           pool close           map multiprocessing pool ApplyResult wait  async results          lst results    r get   for r in async results          print lst results      def   del   self           self count -  1         print      Destructor  in pid  d  count  d     os getpid    self count       def process obj self  index           print  object  d    index         return  results   Klass nobj 8  workers 3    The output shows that  indeed  the constructor is called once  in the original pid  and the destructor is called 9 times  once for each copy made   2 or 3 times per pool-worker-process as needed  plus once in the original process    This is often OK  as in this case  since the default pickler makes a copy of the entire instance and  semi-  secretly re-populates it   in this case  doing   obj   object   new   Klass  obj   dict   update   count  1        that s why even though the destructor is called eight times in the three worker processes  it counts down from 1 to 0 each time   but of course you can still get into trouble this way   If necessary  you can provide your own   setstate         def   setstate   self  adict           self count   adict  count     in this case for instance

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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

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Some limitations though to Steven Bethard s solution    When you register your class method as a function  the destructor of your class is surprisingly called every time your method processing is finished  So if you have 1 instance of your class that calls n times its method  members may disappear between 2 runs and you may get a message malloc      error for object 0x     pointer being freed was not allocated  e g  open member file  or pure virtual method called  terminate called without an active exception  which means than the lifetime of a member object I used was shorter than what I thought   I got this when dealing with n greater than the pool size  Here is a short example    from multiprocessing import Pool  cpu count from multiprocessing pool import ApplyResult    --------- see Stenven s solution above ------------- from copy reg import pickle from types import MethodType  def  pickle method method       func name   method im func   name       obj   method im self     cls   method im class     return  unpickle method   func name  obj  cls   def  unpickle method func name  obj  cls       for cls in cls mro            try              func   cls   dict   func name          except KeyError              pass         else              break     return func   get   obj  cls    class Myclass object        def   init   self  nobj  workers cpu count              print  Constructor                multi-processing         pool   Pool processes workers          async results     pool apply async self process obj   i    for i in range nobj            pool close             waiting for all results         map ApplyResult wait  async results          lst results  r get   for r in async results          print lst results      def   del   self           print      Destructor       def process obj self  index           print  object  d    index         return  results   pickle MethodType   pickle method   unpickle method  Myclass nobj 8  workers 3    problem     the destructor is called nobj times  instead of once    Output   Constructor     object 0 object 1 object 2     Destructor object 3     Destructor object 4     Destructor object 5     Destructor object 6     Destructor object 7     Destructor     Destructor     Destructor   results    results    results    results    results    results    results    results       Destructor   The   call   method is not so equivalent  because  None      are read from the results    from multiprocessing import Pool  cpu count from multiprocessing pool import ApplyResult  class Myclass object        def   init   self  nobj  workers cpu count              print  Constructor                multiprocessing         pool   Pool processes workers          async results     pool apply async self   i    for i in range nobj            pool close             waiting for all results         map ApplyResult wait  async results          lst results  r get   for r in async results          print lst results      def   call   self  i           self process obj i       def   del   self           print      Destructor       def process obj self  i           print  obj  d    i         return  result   Myclass nobj 8  workers 3    problem     the destructor is called nobj times  instead of once        and   results are empty     So none of both methods is satisfying

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All of these solutions are ugly because multiprocessing and pickling is broken and limited unless you jump outside the standard library   If you use a fork of multiprocessing called pathos multiprocesssing  you can directly use classes and class methods in multiprocessing s map functions   This is because dill is used instead of pickle or cPickle  and dill can serialize almost anything in python   pathos multiprocessing also provides an asynchronous map function    and it can map functions with multiple arguments  e g  map math pow   1 2 3    4 5 6     See  What can multiprocessing and dill do together   and  http   matthewrocklin com blog work 2013 12 05 Parallelism-and-Serialization    gt  gt  gt  import pathos pools as pp  gt  gt  gt  p   pp ProcessPool 4   gt  gt  gt    gt  gt  gt  def add x y         return x y       gt  gt  gt  x    0 1 2 3   gt  gt  gt  y    4 5 6 7   gt  gt  gt    gt  gt  gt  p map add  x  y   4  6  8  10   gt  gt  gt    gt  gt  gt  class Test object         def plus self  x  y            return x y       gt  gt  gt  t   Test    gt  gt  gt    gt  gt  gt  p map Test plus   t  4  x  y   4  6  8  10   gt  gt  gt    gt  gt  gt  p map t plus  x  y   4  6  8  10    And just to be explicit  you can do exactly want you wanted to do in the first place  and you can do it from the interpreter  if you wanted to    gt  gt  gt  import pathos pools as pp  gt  gt  gt  class someClass object         def   init   self           pass       def f self  x           return x x       def go self           pool   pp ProcessPool 4          print pool map self f  range 10         gt  gt  gt  sc   someClass    gt  gt  gt  sc go    0  1  4  9  16  25  36  49  64  81   gt  gt  gt     Get the code here   https   github com uqfoundation pathos

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Why not to use separate func   def func  args    kwargs       return inst method args  kwargs   print pool map func  arr

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The solution from parisjohn above works fine with me  Plus the code looks clean and easy to understand  In my case there are a few functions to call using Pool  so I modified parisjohn s code a bit below  I made call to be able to call several functions  and the function names are passed in the argument dict from go     from multiprocessing import Pool class someClass object       def   init   self           pass      def f self  x           return x x      def g self  x           return x x 1          def go self           p   Pool 4          sc   p map self     func    f    v   1     func    g    v   2            print sc      def   call   self  x           if x  func     f               return self f x  v            if x  func     g               return self g x  v             sc   someClass   sc go

[python] Can't pickle <type 'instancemethod'> when using multiprocessing Pool.map()

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