PYTHON, FLASK, SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION, UWSGI, WEB
I recently had to deploy a Flask web app for Hush Little Baby Early Childhood Music Classes (shameless plug) with uWSGI. (Sidenote: Flask + SQLAlchemy + WTForms = awesome.) I ran into an extremely exasperating issue which I thought I'd document here in case anyone else runs into it.
Despite the fact that uWSGI recommends that you run a separate instance for each app, I prefer the dynamic app approach. While i certainly understand why separate instances are recommended, I think per-app instances waste resources, especially when they have a lot of common dependencies, including Python itself. I also set uWSGI to use multiple threads. Unfortunately, with Flask, this is a recipe for disaster.
As soon as Flask is imported by a dynamic app in this configuration, uWSGI instantly hangs and stops responding altogether. The only option is to kill -9. After hours of late night testing, debugging, muttering, cursing, finally going to bed and then more of the same the next day, I finally thought to try disabling threads in uWSGI. And it… worked.
Still, I needed a little bit of concurrency, didn't want to use multiple processes and didn't want to abandon the dynamic app approach. It occurred to me that if it worked fine with per-app instances (I didn't actually test this, but surely someone would have reported such a problem) and a single thread, then it should work if flask were imported before the threading stuff happened. This led me to discover the shared-pyimport option. Sure enough, if I specify flask as a shared import (though a non-shared miport might work just as well), it works even with threads > 1. Horray!
I still don't know if this is a bug in Flask, a Flask dependency or uWSGI or whether it's just a configuration that can never work for reasons I don't understand. I don't really have time to debug it, so I'm just happy I found a solution.