[Twisted-Python] reactor.spawnProcess() and file descriptors

[Carlos Valiente]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 13:04, Itamar Turner-Trauring
<itamar at itamarst.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 12:52 +0100, Carlos Valiente wrote:
>> Hi! Is there any way of telling  reactor.spawnProcess() not to close
>> all open file descriptors?
>
> My Unix knowledge is weak, but - couldn't you pass in duplicate fds, so
> that when they are closed it wouldn't affect the originals?

Thanks for your reply, Itamar. I wanted to skip the calls to close()
-- 1024 of them, in my case -- because,  according to strace(1),  that
takes about 100 ms (and I'd like to save those milliseconds). From
reading twisted.internet.process.Process._setupChild(), it seems that
passing a dupped file descriptor would trigger at least another call
to dup():

    for child in childlist:
        target = fdmap[child]
            if target == child:
                # fd is already in place
                if debug: print >>errfd, "%d already in place" % target
                fdesc._unsetCloseOnExec(child)
            else:
                if child in fdmap.values():
                    # we can't replace child-fd yet, as some other mapping
                    # still needs the fd it wants to target. We must preserve
                    # that old fd by duping it to a new home.
                    newtarget = os.dup(child) # give it a safe home
                    if debug: print >>errfd, "os.dup(%d) -> %d" % (child,
                                                                   newtarget)
                    os.close(child) # close the original
                    for c, p in fdmap.items():
                        if p == child:
                            fdmap[c] = newtarget # update all pointers
                # now it should be available
                if debug: print >>errfd, "os.dup2(%d,%d)" % (target, child)
                os.dup2(target, child)