Hello there!

What did I do last week?

Not much, but seemingly implementation-wise I have finished my GSoC project:

• Finish the implementation of wheels' parallel download (GH-8771)
• Help make pip's CI green again (GH-8790)
• Reformat a few spots in user guide (GH-8795)

Did I get stuck anywhere?

I got sick, but I am recovering now!

What is coming up next?

I will try to spend the time I got left within the scope of GSoC to improve cache usage of the fast-deps feature.

And now it's clear as this promise
That we're making
Two progress bars into one

Hello there! It has been raining a lot lately and my wisdom tooth has decided to start growing today, causing me a mild fever. To whoever reading this, I hope it wouldn't happen to you.

Download Parallelization

I've been working on pip's download parallelization for quite a while now. As distribution download in pip was modeled as a lazily evaluated iterable of chunks, parallelizing such procedure is as simple as submitting routines that write files to disk to a worker pool.

Or at least that is what I thought.

Progress Reporting UI

pip is currently using customly defined progress reporting classes, which was not designed to working with multithreading code. Firstly, I want to try using these instead of defining separate UI for multithreaded progresses. As they use system signals for termination, one must the progress bars has to be running the main thread. Or sort of.

Since the progress bars are designed as iterators, I realized that we can call next on them. So quickly, I throw in some queues and locks, and prototyped the first working implementation of progress synchronization.

Performance Issues

Welp, I only said that it works, but I didn't mention the performance, which is terrible. I am pretty sure that the slow down is with the synchronization, since the map_multithread call doesn't seem to trigger anything that may introduce any sort of blocking.

This seems like a lot of fun, and I hope I'll get better tomorrow to continue playing with it!

Hello there!

What did I do last week?

It has been a quite fun week for me, given the current state of development and the newly dicovered bugs thanks to pip 20.2 release:

• Initiate discussion with the maintainers of pip on isolating networking code for late download in parallel (GH-8697)
• Discuss the UI of parallel download (GH-8698)
• Log debug information relating lazy wheel decision (GH-8710)
• Disable caching for range requests (GH-8716)
• Dedent late download logs (GH-8722)
• Add a hook for batch downloading (third attempt I think) (GH-8737)
• Test hash checking for fast-deps (GH-8743)

Did I get stuck anywhere?

Not exactly, everything is going smoothly and I'm feeling awesome!

What is coming up next?

I'll try to solve GH-8697 and GH-8698 within the next few days. I am optimistic that the parallel download prototype will be done within this week.

Hi! I really hope that everyone reading this is still doing okay, and if that isn't the case, I wish you a good day!

pip 20.2 Released!

Last Wednesday, pip 20.2 was released, delivering the 2020-resolver as well as many other improvements! I was lucky to be able to get the fast-deps feature to be included as part of the release. A brief description of this experimental feature as well as testing instruction can be found on Python Discuss.

The public exposure of the feature also remind me of some further optimization to make on the lazy wheel. Hopefully without download parallelization it would not be too slow to put off testing by concerned users of pip.

Preparation for Download Parallelization

As of this moment, we already have:

• Multithreading pool fallback working
• An opt-in to use lazy wheel to optain dependency information, and thus getting a list of wheels at the end of resolution ready to be downloaded together

What's left is only to interject a parallel download somewhere after the dependency resolution step. Still, this struggles me way more than I've ever imagined. I got so stuck that I had to give myself a day off in the middle of the week (and study some Rust), then I came up with something what was agreed upon as difficult to maintain.

Indeed, a large part of this is my fault, for not communicating the design thoroughly with pip's maintainers and not carefully noting stuff down during (verbal) discussions with my mentor. Thankfully Chris Hunt came to the rescue and did a refactoring that will make my future work much easier and cleaner.