Lifetimes of a User-Spawn Process#

When you spawns child processes from Ray workers, you are responsible for managing the lifetime of child processes. However, it is not always possible, especially when worker crashes and child processes are spawned from libraries (torch dataloader).

To avoid leaking user-spawned processes, Ray provides mechanisms to kill all user-spawned processes when a worker that starts it exits. This feature prevents GPU memory leaks from child processes (e.g., torch).

We have 2 environment variables to handle subprocess killing on worker exit:

  • RAY_kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit (default true): Only works on Linux. If true, the worker kills all direct child processes on exit. This won’t work if the worker crashed. This is NOT recursive, in that grandchild processes are not killed by this mechanism.

  • RAY_kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit_with_raylet_subreaper (default false): Only works on Linux greater than or equal to 3.4. If true, Raylet recursively kills any child processes and grandchild processes that were spawned by the worker after the worker exits. This works even if the worker crashed. The killing happens within 10 seconds after the worker death.

On non-Linux platforms, user-spawned process is not controlled by Ray. The user is responsible for managing the lifetime of the child processes. If the parent Ray worker process dies, the child processes will continue to run.

Note: The feature is meant to be a last resort to kill orphaned processes. It is not a replacement for proper process management. Users should still manage the lifetime of their processes and clean up properly.

User-Spawned Process Killed on Worker Exit#

The following example uses a Ray Actor to spawn a user process. The user process is a sleep process. .. testcode:

import ray
import psutil
import subprocess
import time
import os

ray.init(_system_config={"kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit_with_raylet_subreaper":True})

@ray.remote
class MyActor:
  def __init__(self):
    pass

  def start(self):
    # Start a user process
    process = subprocess.Popen(["/bin/bash", "-c", "sleep 10000"])
    return process.pid

  def signal_my_pid(self):
    import signal
    os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGKILL)


actor = MyActor.remote()

pid = ray.get(actor.start.remote())
assert psutil.pid_exists(pid)  # the subprocess running

actor.signal_my_pid.remote()  # sigkill'ed, the worker's subprocess killing no longer works
time.sleep(11)  # raylet kills orphans every 10s
assert not psutil.pid_exists(pid)

Enabling the feature#

To enable the subreaper feature, set the environment variable RAY_kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit_with_raylet_subreaper to true when starting the Ray cluster, If a Ray cluster is already running, you need to restart the Ray cluster to apply the change. Setting env_var in a runtime environment will NOT work.

RAY_kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit_with_raylet_subreaper=true ray start --head

Another way is to enable it during ray.init() by adding a _system_config like this:

ray.init(_system_config={"kill_child_processes_on_worker_exit_with_raylet_subreaper":True})

⚠️ Caution: Core worker now reaps zombies, toggle back if you wait to waitpid#

When the feature is enabled, the worker process becomes a subreaper (see the next section), meaning there can be some grandchildren processes that are reparented to the worker process. To reap these processes, the worker sets the SIGCHLD signal to SIG_IGN. This makes the worker not receive the SIGCHLD signal when its children exit. If you need to wait for a child process to exit, you need to reset the SIGCHLD signal to SIG_DFL.

import signal
signal.signal(signal.SIGCHLD, signal.SIG_DFL)

Under the hood#

This feature is implemented by setting the prctl(PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER, 1) flag on the Raylet process which spawns all Ray workers. See prctl(2). This flag makes the Raylet process a “subreaper” which means that if a descendant child process dies, the dead child’s children processes reparent to the Raylet process.

Raylet maintains a list of “known” direct children pid it spawns, and when the Raylet process receives the SIGCHLD signal, it knows that one of its child processes (e.g. the workers) has died, and maybe there are reparented orphan processes. Raylet lists all children pids (with ppid = raylet pid), and if a child pid is not “known” (i.e. not in the list of direct children pids), Raylet thinks it is an orphan process and kills it via SIGKILL.

For a deep chain of process creations, Raylet would do the killing step by step. For example, in a chain like this:

raylet -> the worker -> user process A -> user process B -> user process C

When the the worker dies, Raylet kills the user process A, because it’s not on the “known” children list. When user process A dies, Raylet kills user process B, and so on.

An edge case is, if the the worker is still alive but the user process A is dead, then user process B gets reparented and risks being killed. To mitigate, Ray also sets the the worker as a subreaper, so it can adopt the reparented processes. Core worker does not kill unknown children processes, so a user “daemon” process e.g. user process B that outlives user process A can live along. However if the the worker dies, the user daemon process gets reparented to raylet and gets killed.

Related PR: Use subreaper to kill unowned subprocesses in raylet. (#42992)