How do you set a timeout in Python's gRPC Library

Question

I have a grpc server / client that today will occasionally hang, causing issues. This is being called from a Flask application which is checking in with a background worker process to make sure it's alive / functioning. To make the request to the gRPC server, I have:

try:
        health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping)
        if health.message == u'PONG':
            return {
                u'healthy': True,
                u'message': {
                    u'healthy': True,
                    u'message': u'success'
                },
                u'status_code': 200
            }
except Exception as e:
        if str(e.code()) == u'StatusCode.UNAVAILABLE':
            return {
                u'healthy': False,
                u'message': {
                    u'healthy': False,
                    u'message': (u'[503 Unavailable] connection to worker '
                                 u'failed')},
                u'status_code': 200}
        elif str(e.code()) == u'StatusCode.INTERNAL':
            return {
                u'healthy': False,
                u'message': {
                    u'healthy': False,
                    u'message': (u'[500 Internal] worker encountered '
                                 u'an error while responding')},
                u'status_code': 200}
        return {
            u'healthy': False,
            u'message': {u'healthy': False, u'message': e.message},
            u'status_code': 500
        }

the client is a stub:

channel = grpc.insecure_channel(address)
stub = WorkerStub(channel)
return stub

the proto is:

syntax = "proto3";

option java_multiple_files = true;
option java_package = "com.company.project.worker";
option java_outer_classname = "ProjectWorker";
option objc_class_prefix = "PJW";

package projectworker;

service Worker {
  rpc Health (Ping) returns (Pong) {}
}

// The request message containing PONG
message Ping {
  string message = 1;
}

// The response message containing PONG
message Pong {
  string message = 1;
}

Using this code, how would I then add a timeout to ensure that I can always respond rather than fail and hang?

Answer 1

timeout is an optional keyword parameter on RPC invocation so you should change

health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping)

to

health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping, timeout=my_timeout_in_seconds)

.

Answer 2

You may also want to catch and handle timeouts differently than other errors. Sadly the documentation is not quite good on this topic, so here's what you have:

try:
    health = self.grpc_client.Health(self.health_ping, timeout=my_timeout_in_seconds)
except grpc.RpcError as e:
    e.details()
    status_code = e.code()
    status_code.name
    status_code.value

Timeout will return DEADLINE_EXCEEDED status_code.value.