Working With Fork Process Models

The BatchSpanProcessor is not fork-safe and doesn’t work well with application servers (Gunicorn, uWSGI) which are based on the pre-fork web server model. The BatchSpanProcessor spawns a thread to run in the background to export spans to the telemetry backend. During the fork, the child process inherits the lock which is held by the parent process and deadlock occurs. We can use fork hooks to get around this limitation of the span processor.

Please see http://bugs.python.org/issue6721 for the problems about Python locks in (multi)threaded context with fork.

Gunicorn post_fork hook

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor


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

    resource = Resource.create(attributes={
        "service.name": "api-service"
    })

    trace.set_tracer_provider(TracerProvider(resource=resource))
    span_processor = BatchSpanProcessor(
        OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317")
    )
    trace.get_tracer_provider().add_span_processor(span_processor)

uWSGI postfork decorator

from uwsgidecorators import postfork

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor


@postfork
def init_tracing():
    resource = Resource.create(attributes={
        "service.name": "api-service"
    })

    trace.set_tracer_provider(TracerProvider(resource=resource))
    span_processor = BatchSpanProcessor(
        OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317")
    )
    trace.get_tracer_provider().add_span_processor(span_processor)

The source code for the examples with Flask app are available here.