python - Is shared readonly data copied to different processes for multiprocessing?

Question

The piece of code that I have looks some what like this:

glbl_array = # a 3 Gb array

def my_func( args, def_param = glbl_array):
    #do stuff on args and def_param

if __name__ == '__main__':
  pool = Pool(processes=4)
  pool.map(my_func, range(1000))

Is there a way to make sure (or encourage) that the different processes does not get a copy of glbl_array but shares it. If there is no way to stop the copy I will go with a memmapped array, but my access patterns are not very regular, so I expect memmapped arrays to be slower. The above seemed like the first thing to try. This is on Linux. I just wanted some advice from Stackoverflow and do not want to annoy the sysadmin. Do you think it will help if the the second parameter is a genuine immutable object like glbl_array.tostring().

Answer 1

You can use the shared memory stuff from multiprocessing together with Numpy fairly easily:

import multiprocessing
import ctypes
import numpy as np

shared_array_base = multiprocessing.Array(ctypes.c_double, 10*10)
shared_array = np.ctypeslib.as_array(shared_array_base.get_obj())
shared_array = shared_array.reshape(10, 10)

#-- edited 2015-05-01: the assert check below checks the wrong thing
#   with recent versions of Numpy/multiprocessing. That no copy is made
#   is indicated by the fact that the program prints the output shown below.
## No copy was made
##assert shared_array.base.base is shared_array_base.get_obj()

# Parallel processing
def my_func(i, def_param=shared_array):
    shared_array[i,:] = i

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=4)
    pool.map(my_func, range(10))

    print shared_array

which prints [[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] [ 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1.] [ 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2.] [ 3. 3. 3. 3. 3. 3. 3. 3. 3. 3.] [ 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4.] [ 5. 5. 5. 5. 5. 5. 5. 5. 5. 5.] [ 6. 6. 6. 6. 6. 6. 6. 6. 6. 6.] [ 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7.] [ 8. 8. 8. 8. 8. 8. 8. 8. 8. 8.] [ 9. 9. 9. 9. 9. 9. 9. 9. 9. 9.]]

However, Linux has copy-on-write semantics on fork(), so even without using multiprocessing.Array, the data will not be copied unless it is written to.