How to restart Celery gracefully without delaying tasks

Question

We use Celery with our Django webapp to manage offline tasks; some of these tasks can run up to 120 seconds.

Whenever we make any code modifications, we need to restart Celery to have it reload the new Python code. Our current solution is to send a SIGTERM to the main Celery process (kill -s 15 `cat /var/run/celeryd.pid`), then to wait for it to die and restart it (python manage.py celeryd --pidfile=/var/run/celeryd.pid [...]).

Because of the long-running tasks, this usually means the shutdown will take a minute or two, during which no new tasks are processed, causing a noticeable delay to users currently on the site. I'm looking for a way to tell Celery to shutdown, but then immediately launch a new Celery instance to start running new tasks.

Things that didn't work:

• Sending SIGHUP to the main process: this caused Celery to attempt to "restart," by doing a warm shutdown and then relaunching itself. Not only does this take a long time, it doesn't even work, because apparently the new process launches before the old one dies, so the new one complains ERROR: Pidfile (/var/run/celeryd.pid) already exists. Seems we're already running? (PID: 13214) and dies immediately. (This looks like a bug in Celery itself; I've let them know about it.)
• Sending SIGTERM to the main process and then immediately launching a new instance: same issue with the Pidfile.
• Disabling the Pidfile entirely: without it, we have no way of telling which of the 30 Celery process are the main process that needs to be sent a SIGTERM when we want it to do a warm shutdown. We also have no reliable way to check if the main process is still alive.

Answer 1

celeryd has --autoreload option. If enabled, celery worker (main process) will detect changes in celery modules and restart all worker processes. In contrast to SIGHUP signal, autoreload restarts each process independently when the current executing task finishes. It means while one worker process is restarting the remaining processes can execute tasks.

http://celery.readthedocs.org/en/latest/userguide/workers.html#autoreloading

Answer 2

I've recently fixed the bug with SIGHUP: https://github.com/celery/celery/pull/662