Deferred

djangae.deferred.defer

The App Engine SDK provides a utility function called defer() which is used to call functions and methods from the task queue.

The built-in defer() method suffers from a number of issues with both bugs, and the API itself.

djangae.deferred.defer is a near-drop-in replacement for google.appengine.ext.deferred.defer with a few differences:

  • The code has been altered to always use a Datastore entity group unless the task is explicitly marked as being "small" (less than 100k) with the _small_task=True flag.
  • Transactional defers are always transactional, even if the task is > 100k (this is a bug in the original defer)
  • If a Django instance is passed as an argument to the called function, then the foreign key caches are wiped before deferring to avoid bloating and stale data when the task runs. This can be disabled with _wipe_related_caches=False

Everything else should behave in the same way. The actual running of deferred tasks still uses the Google handler (which is wrapped by Djangae)

djange.deferred.defer_iteration_with_finalize

defer_iteration_with_finalize(queryset, callback, finalize, args=None, _queue='default', _shards=5, _delete_marker=True, _transactional=False)

This function provides similar functionality to a Mapreduce pipeline, but it's entirely self-contained and leverages defer to process the tasks.

The function iterates the passed Queryset in shards, calling callback on each instance. Once all shards complete then the finalize callback is called. If a shard gets close to the 10-minute deadline, or it hits an unhandled exception it re-defers another shard to continue processing.

DeadlineExceededError is explicitly not handled. This is because there is rarely enough time between the exception being caught, and the request being terminated, to correctly defer a new shard.

Each processing task keeps track of its execution time and re-defers itself to avoid hitting App Engine's DeadlineExceededError. However, this check is only performed in between the processing of each object and the re-deferring only happens when the task is within _buffer_time seconds of hitting the deadline. So if the processing of an individual model instance takes more than _buffer_time seconds then the DeadlineExceededError may still be hit, which will cause that task to be retried from the beginning, thus re-processing some of the model instances.

If _buffer_time is None (default) then the buffer time will be dynamically calculated from the longest iteration time.

If args is specified, these arguments are passed as positional arguments to both callback (after the instance) and finalize.

_shards is the number of shards to use for processing. If _delete_marker is True then the Datastore entity that tracks complete shards is deleted. If you want to keep these (as a log of sorts) then set this to False.

_transactional and _queue work in the same way as defer()

Identifying a task shard

From a shard callback, you can identify the current shard by accessing os.environ["DEFERRED_ITERATION_SHARD_INDEX"] there is a constant defined for this key:

from djangae.deferred import DEFERRED_ITERATION_SHARD_INDEX_KEY
shard_index = int(os.environ[DEFERRED_ITERATION_SHARD_INDEX_KEY])