Tracing Celery Performance For Web Applications

Dan Kuebrich

Jun. 14, 13 · Interview

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Are you using Celery to process python back-end tasks asynchronously? Have you wanted to get insight into their resource consumption and efficiency? Here’s a few useful ways to get insight into Celery performance when running tasks.

A simple celery task

For a quick review, Celery lets you turn any python method into an asynchronous task. Here’s a simple one:

Let’s trace Celery!

We’ll start with the good stuff. In the latest release of our Python instrumentation, oboeware-1.0, we have an updated API that makes it super-easy to gather performance data from any Python code, including Celery tasks. Here’s how we’d add tracing to our example task:

The key part is the @oboe.Context.trace decorator. Note that we’re assigning to the keys Controller and Action. This will be used by TraceView to segment the data. You can also optionally use the keys HTTP-Host and URL to indicate domain and URL to TraceView. Here’s what the data we’re gathering looks like in the dashboard (I added a few sqlalchemy queries to spice up the data):

The code at the top is configuration tunables: set the sample rate to a fractional value to trace only a fraction of your Celery tasks.

Event-based workers

You might be using event-based workers to save a few bytes of ram. TraceView also supports eventlet-based workers. However, you’ll need to install our TraceView-enabled greenlet module using pip or easy install:

1	`$ pip install --extra-index-url=http://pypi.tracelytics.com greenlet-0.3.4-tly1.0`

Slightly more interesting

Of course, you’re probably interested in more complex celery tasks than that. The good news is, all of our normal instrumentation works with your celery workers. Here’s a screenshot of one of our internal Celery workers in action:

Other resources

Looking for different tools? Good news–there’s a pretty healthy Celery ecosystem. Here’s a few useful packages and I’m sure there’s tons I’m forgetting–leave comments for anything else you find helpful with Celery!

If you want to keep track of worker status, you might be interested in celerymon, a monitor for celery tasks. It keeps tabs of task execution and workers.
Trying to track down a memory leak? Consider running dowser inside your celery worker.

Photo Credit: dottiemae

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