Background tasks

Some actions can often take a lot of time to complete, which may cause the client to timeout before receiving a response. Equally some tasks just don’t need to be completed before the response is sent and instead can be done in the background. Asyncio provides functionality to run tasks like these in the background, however care must be taken if the task is CPU heavy.

In the below example two background tasks will be created, one that runs in the same thread (and event loop) as the Quart server and another that runs on a separate thread. CPU heavy tasks should run on a separate thread via the run_in_executor function.

async def io_background_task():
    ...

async def cpu_background_task():
    ...

@app.route('/jobs/', methods=['POST'])
async def create_job():
    # Runs in this event loop
    asyncio.ensure_future(io_background_task())

    # Runs on another thread
    asyncio.get_running_loop().run_in_executor(None, cpu_background_task())
    return 'Success'

These background tasks will not have access to the request or app context, unless the copy functions are used, see Contexts.

Warning

As Quart is based on asyncio it will run on a single execution and switch between tasks as they become blocked on waiting on IO, if a task does not need to wait on IO it will instead block the event loop and Quart could become unresponsive. Additionally the task will consume the same CPU resources as the server and hence could slow the server.