Mismanagement of dask future results slow down the performances - dask

Question

I'm looking for any suggestion on how to solve the bottleneck below described.
Within a dask distributed infrastructure I map some futures and gain results whenever they are ready. Once retrieved I've to invoke a time consuming, blocking "pandas" function and, unfortunately, this function can't be avoided.
The optimum would be to have something that let me create another process, detached from the for loop, that's able to ingest the flow of results. For other constraints, not present in the example, the output can't be serialized and sent to workers and must be processed on the master.
here a small mockup. Just grab the idea and not focus too much on the details of the code.
class pxldrl(object):
def __init__(self, df):
self.table = df
def simulation(list_param):
time.sleep(random.random())
val = sum(list_param)/4
if val < 0.5:
result = {'param_e': val}
else:
result = {'param_f': val}
return pxldrl(result)
def costly_function(result, output):
time.sleep(1)
# blocking pandas function
output = output.append(result.table, sort=False, ignore_index=True)
return output
def main():
client = Client(n_workers=4, threads_per_worker=1)
output = pd.DataFrame(columns=['param_e', 'param_f'])
input = pd.DataFrame(np.random.random(size=(100, 4)),
columns=['param_a', 'param_b', 'param_c', 'param_d'])
for i in range(2):
futures = client.map(simulation, input.values)
for future, result in as_completed(futures, with_results=True):
output = costly_function(result, output)

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to run costly_function in a separate thread. Perhaps you could using the threading or concurrent.futures module to run your entire routine on a separate thread?
If you wanted to get fancy, you could even use Dask again and create a second client that ran within this process:
local_client = Client(processes=False)
and use that. (although you'll have to be careful about mixing futures between clients, which won't work)