[Django]-Gunicorn, Django, and slow loading code…?

Gunicorn has some pretty awesome configuration. Was browsing around a git clone of their source and found an example_config.py which has a “post_fork” which got me thinking. After some poking around the source a bit more, I came up with this solution.

% gunicorn_django -c path/to/gunicorn_conf.py path/to/settings.py

Where gunicorn_conf.py has this function:

def post_fork(server, worker):
    server.log.info("%s: Worker spawned" % worker.pid)

    from gunicorn.workers.sync import SyncWorker
    class SyncWorkerPreload(SyncWorker):
        def run(self):
            pass

        def init_process(self):
            super(SyncWorkerPreload, self).init_process()
            from django.db.models.loading import get_apps
            get_apps()
            server.log.info('%s: App loaded' % self.pid)
            super(SyncWorkerPreload, self).run()

    worker.__class__ = SyncWorkerPreload

Hope that helps someone google’ing to find this hint.

Pretty awesome that Gunicorn was flexible enough to allow for this!

UPDATE: updated code, simply loading modules in settings sometimes breaks due to the way django loads modules I assume… this new code monkey patches gunicorn to load the modules at a “safe” time… hopefully

UPDATE: gunicorn 0.12.1 fixes this issue