[New-bugs-announce] [issue35279] asyncio uses too many threads by default

[Vojtěch Boček]

New submission from Vojtěch Boček <vbocek at gmail.com>:

By default, asyncio spawns as many as os.cpu_count() * 5 threads to run I/O on. When combined with beefy machines (e.g. kubernetes servers) with, says, 56 cores, it results in very high memory usage.

This is amplified by the fact that the `concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor` threads are never killed, and are not re-used until `max_workers` threads are spawned.

Workaround:

    loop.set_default_executor(concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=8))

This is still not ideal as the program might not need max_workers threads, but they are still spawned anyway.

I've hit this issue when running asyncio program in kubernetes. It created 260 idle threads and then ran out of memory.

I think the default max_workers should be limited to some max value and ThreadPoolExecutor should not spawn new threads unless necessary.

----------
components: asyncio
messages: 330101
nosy: Vojtěch Boček, asvetlov, yselivanov
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: asyncio uses too many threads by default
type: resource usage
versions: Python 3.7

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue35279>
_______________________________________