Ansible waits for async task to complete for non-zero poll value - Intended behavior or some problem here ?

[ishan jain]

I want to start a long running task in my playbook and immediately move to the next task, and handle the async task return code later. Here is what i have:

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:

    - name: Invoke jmeter test cases
      shell: sleep 10 | echo done
      register: out
      async: 1000
      poll: 1

    - name: wait 5 seconds
      shell: sleep 5

    - debug: var=out

Since i have a non-zero poll value, it waits on the first task to complete entirely and then move to the next one.

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [jmeter] => {
    "out": {
        "ansible_job_id": "844960465574.3266",
        "changed": true,
        "cmd": "sleep 10 | echo done",
        "delta": "0:00:10.006777",
        "end": "2017-06-20 08:20:00.965567",
        "finished": 1,
        "rc": 0,
        "start": "2017-06-20 08:19:50.958790",
        "stderr": "",
        "stdout": "done",
        "stdout_lines": [
            "done"
        ],
        "warnings": []
    }
}

But if i put some non zero value to poll, it fires and forget and even if the task was completed while printing in the debug statement, it gets "finished": 0

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [jmeter] => {
    "out": {
        "ansible_job_id": "229361279978.5796",
        "changed": false,
        "finished": 0,
        "results_file": "/home/dockeradmin/.ansible_async/229361279978.5796",
        "started": 1
    }
}

I wanted to ask if this is an intended behavior ? What i understood with async is that it will always move to the next task and poll value will determine when to check back and then use the outcomes in async_status or something. Or is it that async with non zero poll is blocking but internally it is doing things differently ?

[Brian Coca]

This is by design, you want poll 0 AND use async_status later on to
check for that job's status.


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Brian Coca