Killing a program using multiprocessing

Question

I'm using the multiprocessing module to do parallel processing in my program. When I'm testing it, I'll often want to kill the program early when I notice a bug, since it takes a while to run to completion. In my Linux environment, I run my program from a terminal, and use Ctrl+C to kill it. With multiprocessing, this causes all the processes to be killed, but I never get the bash prompt back, and have to close the terminal and open a new one (and navigate back to my working directory) which is quite annoying. Is there any way to get around this?

Can you please provide a sample of what you're trying to achieve ? — hyperboreean, Sep 10 '10 at 17:09
See this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1408356/keyboard-interrupts-with-pythons-multiprocessing-pool — wchung, Oct 21 '11 at 20:43

llasram · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-10T17:20:03.030

23

Hit Ctrl-Z to suspend the Python process, then do kill %1 to kill it. You can also just hit Ctrl-\ (backslash), but that may cause the process to leave a core file.

edited Sep 10 '10 at 17:20

answered Sep 10 '10 at 17:12

llasram

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+1: Sometimes with multithreaded/multiprocess programs you have to `kill -9 %1` that bad boy. – jathanism Sep 10 '10 at 17:20

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 16 '11 at 17:31

But wait ... isn't there a way of handling the KeyboardException event to kill the processes in the pool?

I tried:

except KeyboardInterrupt as e: # Ctrl-C
    print("Killing all the children in the pool.")
    pool.close()
    pool.terminate()
    return 1
    # raise e

But it doesn't seem to work.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 10 '10 at 17:12

0

You could use screen to start the process, then kill the screen session when you need to. It won't take out the whole bash terminal. For a good screen tutorial see:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

answered Sep 10 '10 at 17:12

Jonathan Holloway

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Killing a program using multiprocessing

3 Answers3