How can I know when a sub-process is effectively initialized?

[Giampaolo Rodola']

On 26 Feb, 21:59, Jean-Paul Calderone <exar... at divmod.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:27:26 -0800 (PST), Giampaolo Rodola' <gne... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Hi,
> >I'm working on a Python module called psutil [1] for reading process
> >information in a cross-platform way.
> >I'm having a problem with psutil test suite.
> >Almost all the test cases we implemented so far look like this:
>
> >def test_foo(self):
> >    test_process = subprocess.Popen(sys.executable, stdout=DEVNULL,
> >stderr=DEVNULL)
> >    time.sleep(0.1)  # XXX: provisional, give some time the sub
> >process to initialize
> >    p = psutil.Process(test_process.pid)
> >    # start test here
> >    ...
>
> >As you can see we put a time.sleep(0.1) call after subprocess.Popen()
> >as a provisional workaround to let the sub process initialize
> >properly.
> >We're searching for some kind of way to know when the child process is
> >properly initialized so that we can actually start testing cases
> >without worries.
> >Does someone has an idea how could we do that?
>
> Hi Giampaolo,
>
> "Properly initialized" is application specific.  Generally, what you want
> to do is have the child process tell you when it's ready.  A common way
> to do this is for the child to write some bytes to a file descriptor the
> parent is monitoring when it is ready.  The parent then just waits for
> those bytes.  It looks like you entirely control the child in this case,
> so that should be possible here.
>
> Alternatively, maybe by "properly initialized" you mean something very
> specific about how subprocess.Popen creates processes.  If so, can you
> elaborate a bit?
>
> Jean-Paul

By "properly initialized" I mean when I can actually start fetching
information from the process (e.g. name, path, parent pid, etc...).
Anyway, I came out with this solution:


def wait_for_pid(pid, timeout=1):
    """Wait for pid to show up in the process list then return.
    Used in the test suite to give time the sub process to initialize.
    """
    raise_at = time.time() + timeout
    while 1:
        if pid in psutil.get_pid_list():
            return
        time.sleep(0.0001)
        if time.time() >= raise_at:
            raise RuntimeError("Timed out")


def test_foo():
    proc = subprocess.Popen(PYTHON, stdout=DEVNULL, stderr=DEVNULL)
    wait_for_pid(proc.pid)
    ...


It seems to work fine on posix but we still got problems on Windows
where it seems that waiting for pid to show up in the system process
list is not enough for considering the process effectively
initialized.
Anyway, I think it's a problem in our code.
Thanks for your help, anyway.


--- Giampaolo
http://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib