python-libtorrent program doesn’t exit

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

I was mucking about with the Python bindings for libtorrent, and made something like this:

import libtorrent

fname = 'test.torrent'
ses = libtorrent.session()
ses.listen_on(6881, 6891)

info = libtorrent.torrent_info(fname)
h = ses.add_torrent({'ti': info, 'save_path': session_dir})
prev_progress = -1
while (not h.is_seed()):
    status = h.status()
    progress = int(round(status.progress * 100))
    if progress != prev_progress:
        print 'Torrenting %s: %i%% done' % (h.name(), progress)
        prev_progress = progress
    time.sleep(1)

print "Done torrenting %s" % (h.name())
# ... more code

After running it a few times, I noticed the program would not always terminate. You’d immediately suspect a problem in the while loop condition, but in all cases "Done torrenting Foo" would be printed and then the program would hang.

In celebration of one of the rare occasions that I don’t spot a hanging problem in such a simple piece of code right away, I fired up PDB, the Python debugger, which told me:

$ pdb ./tvt 
> /home/fboender/Development/tvtgrab/trunk/src/tvt(9)()
-> import sys
(Pdb) cont
Torrenting Example Torrent v1.0: 100% done
Done torrenting Example Torrent v1.0
The program finished and will be restarted

after which it promptly hung. That last line, “The program finished and will be restarted“, that’s PDB telling us execution of the program finished. Yet it still hung.

At this point, I was suspecting threads. Since libtorrent is a C++ program, and as the main loop in my code doesn’t actually really do anything, it seems libtorrent is doing its thing in the background, and not properly shutting down every now and then. (Although it’s more likely I just don’t understand what it’s doing) It’s quite normal for torrent clients to take a while before closing down, especially if there are still peers connected. Most of the time, if I waited long enough, the program would terminate normally. However, sometimes it wouldn’t terminate even after an hour, even if no peers were at any point connected to any torrents (the original code does not always load torrents into a session).

Digging through the documentation, I couldn’t easily find a method of shutting down the session. I did notice the following:

~session()

The destructor of session will notify all trackers that our torrents have been shut down. If some trackers are down, they will time out. All this before the destructor of session returns. So, it’s advised that any kind of interface (such as windows) are closed before destructing the session object. Because it can take a few second for it to finish. The timeout can be set with set_settings().

Seems like libtorrent uses destructors to shut down the session. Adding the following to the end of the code fixed the problem of the script not exiting:

del ses

The del statement in Python calls any destructors (if you’re lucky) on that class. Having nearly zero C++ knowledge, I suspect C++ calls destructors automatically at program exit. Python doesn’t do that though, so we have to call it manually.

Update: Calling the destructor does not definitively solve the problem. I am still experiencing problems with hangs when calling the session destructor. I will investigate further and update when a solution has been found.

Update II: Well, I’ve not been able to solve the problem any other way than upgrading to the latest version of libtorrent. So I guess that’ll have to do.

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python-libtorrent program doesn’t exit