multiprocessing: How do I share a dict among multiple processes?

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A program that creates several processes that work on a join-able queue, Q, and may eventually manipulate a global dictionary D to store results. (so each child process may use D to store its result and also see what results the other child processes are producing)

If I print the dictionary D in a child process, I see the modifications that have been done on it (i.e. on D). But after the main process joins Q, if I print D, it's an empty dict!

I understand it is a synchronization/lock issue. Can someone tell me what is happening here, and how I can synchronize access to D?

shared-variable dictionary multiprocessing python
5 Answers

In addition to @senderle's here, some might also be wondering how to use the functionality of multiprocessing.Pool.

The nice thing is that there is a .Pool() method to the manager instance that mimics all the familiar API of the top-level multiprocessing.

from itertools import repeat
import multiprocessing as mp
import os
import pprint

def f(d: dict) -> None:
    pid = os.getpid()
    d[pid] = "Hi, I was written by process %d" % pid

if __name__ == '__main__':
    with mp.Manager() as manager:
        d = manager.dict()
        with manager.Pool() as pool:
            pool.map(f, repeat(d, 10))
        # `d` is a DictProxy object that can be converted to dict
        pprint.pprint(dict(d))

Output:

$ python3 mul.py 
{22562: 'Hi, I was written by process 22562',
 22563: 'Hi, I was written by process 22563',
 22564: 'Hi, I was written by process 22564',
 22565: 'Hi, I was written by process 22565',
 22566: 'Hi, I was written by process 22566',
 22567: 'Hi, I was written by process 22567',
 22568: 'Hi, I was written by process 22568',
 22569: 'Hi, I was written by process 22569',
 22570: 'Hi, I was written by process 22570',
 22571: 'Hi, I was written by process 22571'}

This is a slightly different example where each process just logs its process ID to the global DictProxy object d.

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