How to call a function with Process no linked and destroy after some period

Questions / Help
1

Problem: I want to upload a file between 1mb to 50mb to S3, but I don’t want to keep user waiting for the Response in the UI, I want to do it async, spawning a process and execute it, after X seconds(or the execution) destroy the process Supervisor

Example: (The library using this is the ex_aws_s3)

defmodule Upload do
  #lets assume that upload is already uploaded using phoenix
  def process_store(upload) do
    {:ok, pid} = Task.Supervisor.start_link()

     Task.Supervisor.async_nolink(pid, fn ->
        {:ok, file_binary} = File.read(file.path)

        ExAws.S3.put_object("my-bucker", "my-file", file_binary,[{:acl, :bucket_owner_full_control}])
       |> ExAws.request()
    end)
  end
end

What I want is: After process_store/1, ensure that the Task.Supervisor.async_nolink/2 will be executed and kill the supervisor pid without link or await the current process.

1 Like
2

If you aren’t doing anything to the file that is uploaded by the user wouldn’t it be better to upload it directly to S3 from the users browser?

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3

I’m doing, this is only a snippet of code, an example, The case is not the upload,
I just want to know if is possible I run Task.Supervisor.start_link() and Task.Supervisor.async_nolink
without block current process and stop/kill the supervisor after X seconds or something like that

What happens with I do not use this Supervisor Process, he will stay alive in BEAM forever?

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4

I think you want to start the Task supervisor as part of your supervision tree and use dynamically started tasks.

Inside your lib/app/application.ex
children = [
…
{Task.Supervisor, name: MyApp.TaskSupervisor, shutdown: XXXX}
]

And

Task.Supervisor.start_child(MyApp.TaskSupervisor, fn ->
  # Do something
end)

I haven’t used tasks extensively so I might be wrong, but perhaps writing your own genserver that is started dynamically for every file upload would be a better approach has you have more ways to control the upload process (including timeouts)?

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