@Marvin, I received a warning in my task log “Task parameter introspection took 437.891 seconds , exceeding

PREFECT_TASK_INTROSPECTION_WARN_THRESHOLD

of 10.0. Try wrapping large task parameters with

prefect.utilities.annotations.quote

for increased performance, e.g.

my_task(quote(param))

. To disable this message set

PREFECT_TASK_INTROSPECTION_WARN_THRESHOLD=0

.” What does this mean?

The warning you're seeing is related to Prefect's introspection of task parameters. Prefect performs introspection to understand the parameters that are being passed to your tasks. However, this process can take some time, especially if the parameters are large. The

PREFECT_TASK_INTROSPECTION_WARN_THRESHOLD

is a setting that defines a threshold (in seconds) for how long the introspection process should take before a warning is issued. In your case, the introspection took 437.891 seconds, which exceeded the default threshold of 10.0 seconds, hence the warning. The warning suggests a potential solution to improve performance: wrapping large task parameters with

prefect.utilities.annotations.quote

. This function essentially "quotes" or "freezes" the parameter, preventing Prefect from trying to introspect it, which can speed up the process. If you want to disable this warning, you can set

PREFECT_TASK_INTROSPECTION_WARN_THRESHOLD=0

. Please note that these are general suggestions and the best solution may depend on the specifics of your tasks and parameters.

@Marvin, I tried wrapping the parameters I send to my task with

my_task.submit(quote(param))

, but inside the task this causes an attribute error since it is a quote object and not the original type of the param

The

quote

function in Prefect is used to prevent Prefect from introspecting a task's parameters. However, it does this by wrapping the parameter in a

Quote

object, which can cause issues if your task expects the parameter to be of a certain type. When you use

quote

, the parameter is not immediately evaluated. Instead, it's stored as a

Quote

object and only evaluated when the task is run. This means that if your task tries to access an attribute or method of the original parameter, it will instead be trying to access it on the

Quote

object, leading to an

AttributeError

. To avoid this, you could unwrap the

Quote

object inside your task before using the parameter. Here's an example:

from prefect.utilities.tasks import unwrap

@task
def my_task(param):
    param = unwrap(param)
    # Now you can use param as normal

The

unwrap

function checks if the parameter is a

Quote

object and, if it is, evaluates it to get the original value. If the parameter is not a

Quote

object,

unwrap

simply returns the parameter as is. This way, you can still use

quote

to improve the performance of your task introspection, while ensuring that your task has access to the parameters it needs in the correct format.