Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Using partition "breaks" program logic

Open
#427 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Start by tracing stream.partition, stream.emit, and accumulate, then read the documented async def process_file example in “Processing Time and Back Pressure.” Determine how a partition flushes when input reaches EOF and how callers can wait for pending processing; done means the final count includes all lines before the concluding print runs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I am struggling to use partition in a pipeline because it "breaks" the logic of my program; presumably because it introduces asynchronous processing.

As a simplified example, I have something that works along the lines of this:

import streamz


def main():
    state = {
        "cnt": 0,
    }
    stream = streamz.Stream()
    cntd = stream.accumulate(cnt,
                             returns_state=True,
                             start=state)
    cntd.sink(print)

    with open("many_lines.txt", "r") as fh:
        for line in fh:
            stream.emit(line)
    print(f"found {state.get('cnt')} lines")


def cnt(state, itm):
    state["cnt"] += 1
    return state, itm


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This basically runs through all the lines in the file many_lines.txt, counts and prints them and then reports

found 10000 lines

So far so good.

When I introduce partition now, like this:

import streamz


def main():
    state = {
        "cnt": 0,
    }
    stream = streamz.Stream()
    parted = stream.partition(10001, timeout=2)  # <= PARTITION HERE
    cntd = parted.accumulate(cnt,
                             returns_state=True,
                             start=state)
    cntd.sink(print)

    with open("many_lines.txt", "r") as fh:
        for line in fh:
            stream.emit(line)
    print(f"found {state.get('cnt')} lines")


def cnt(state, itm):
    state["cnt"] += 1
    return state, itm


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I would want to see basically the same result. But I see nothing for some time and then

found 0 lines

I know, there are only 10'000 lines in many_lines.txt so the partition will never fill up, but it should hit the timeout at some point and "release" the data, no?

I suspect that the program terminates before the partition hits the timeout, so I tried (many variations of) awaiting stream.emit(line). That was inspired by the async def process_file(fn): function in Processing Time and Back Pressure.

For example like this:

import streamz


def main():
    state = {
        "cnt": 0,
    }
    stream = streamz.Stream()
    parted = stream.partition(10001, timeout=2)
    cntd = parted.accumulate(cnt,
                             returns_state=True,
                             start=state)
    cntd.sink(print)

    with open("many_lines.txt", "r") as fh:
        for line in fh:
            await stream.emit(line)  # <= USE AWAIT HERE
    print(f"found {state.get('cnt')} lines")


def cnt(state, itm):
    state["cnt"] += 1
    return state, itm


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

But this (obviously) does not work (SyntaxError: 'await' outside async function). And I also did not find a way to make it work.

(How) Can I make sure the for loop terminates before the print statement (or any remaining code, for that matter) is executed? Or am I getting this completely wrong?

My use case is to read (all) lines in pretty big files (I cannot load into memory at once), send them through a streamz pipeline and then continue with my program. "Then" meaning, after all lines are processed (also those that might be "stuck" in a partition when no more lines are emitted because we reached EOF; this is why I need the timeout, I believe).

Dominant language
Python
Stars
1.3k
Forks
149
Avg merge
17h 39m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from python-streamz/streamz

All issues in python-streamz/streamz

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.