Package 'heartbeatr'

Title: Heartbeat Support using 'Redis'
Description: Simple heartbeat support for R using 'Redis'. A heartbeat is a background thread that acts as a dead-man's switch. It will create a key on Redis that will automatically expire after a number of seconds and then periodically refresh that key, even when the R process is busy. If the process dies for some reason, then the key will disappear. A heartbeat can be used to detect loss of worker processes on shared systems.
Authors: Rich FitzJohn [aut, cre], Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine [cph]
Maintainer: Rich FitzJohn <[email protected]>
License: MIT + file LICENSE
Version: 0.6.0
Built: 2024-10-26 06:12:10 UTC
Source: https://github.com/mrc-ide/heartbeatr

Help Index


Create a heartbeat instance

Description

Create a heartbeat instance. This can be used by running obj$start() which will reset the TTL (Time To Live) on key every period seconds (don't set this too high). If the R process dies, then the key will expire after 3 * period seconds (or set expire) and another application can tell that this R instance has died.

Usage

heartbeat(
  key,
  period,
  expire = 3 * period,
  value = expire,
  config = NULL,
  start = TRUE,
  timeout = 10
)

Arguments

key

Key to use

period

Timeout period (in seconds)

expire

Key expiry time (in seconds)

value

Value to store in the key. By default it stores the expiry time, so the time since last heartbeat can be computed.

config

Configuration parameters passed through to redux::redis_config. Provide as either a named list or a redis_config object. This allows host, port, password, db, etc all to be set. Socket connections (i.e., using path to access Redis over a socket) are not currently supported.

start

Should the heartbeat be started immediately?

timeout

Time, in seconds, to wait for the heartbeat to appear. It should generally appear very quickly (within a second unless your connection is very slow) so this can be generally left alone.

Details

The heartbeat object has three methods:

  • is_running() which returns TRUE or FALSE if the heartbeat is/is not running.

  • start() which starts a heartbeat

  • stop() which requests a stop for the heartbeat

Heavily inspired by the doRedis package.

Examples

if (redux::redis_available()) {
  rand_str <- function() {
    paste(sample(letters, 20, TRUE), collapse = "")
  }
  key <- sprintf("heartbeatr:test:%s", rand_str())
  h <- heartbeatr::heartbeat(key, 1, expire = 2)
  con <- redux::hiredis()

  # The heartbeat key exists
  con$EXISTS(key)

  # And has an expiry of less than 2000ms
  con$PTTL(key)

  # We can manually stop the heartbeat, and 2s later the key will
  # stop existing
  h$stop()

  # Sys.sleep(2)
  # con$EXISTS(key) # 0
}

Send a signal

Description

Sends a signal to a heartbeat process that is using key key

Usage

heartbeat_send_signal(con, key, signal)

Arguments

con

A hiredis object

key

The heartbeat key

signal

A signal to send (e.g. tools::SIGINT or tools::SIGKILL)

Examples

if (redux::redis_available()) {
  rand_str <- function() {
    paste(sample(letters, 20, TRUE), collapse = "")
  }
  # Suppose we have a process that exposes a heartbeat running on
  # this key:
  key <- sprintf("heartbeatr:test:%s", rand_str())

  # We can send it an interrupt over redis using:
  con <- redux::hiredis()
  heartbeatr::heartbeat_send_signal(con, key, tools::SIGINT)
}