Is thread_sensitive required for ORM calls in async consumers?

[Archmonger]

Andrew Godwin seems to have implied that the Django ORM may not need thread_sensitive=True within async consumers.

andrewgodwin commented on Nov 19, 2020
I think Channels would mostly be safe as there's nothing synchronous on the main thread to lock to, but I'd have to go back into the codebase to be sure, and it's been a loooong time since I actively developed in there.

We are trying to figure out if we can safely turn off thread_sensitive on ReactPy's use_query and use_mutation hooks.

[carltongibson]

I take that as referring only to the consumer related code. Django's ORM definitely requires use of thread_sensitive=True, but the effect of this is mitigated since Django introduced per-request async contexts (so it's one thread per-request, rather than being single threaded.)

[Archmonger]

Are the per-request contexts functional within Channels? My interpretation of that django/django change seems to only have enabled that within the django/django stack.

More specifically, since channels operates outside of the traditional Django stack shouldn't that mean per-request contexts don't exist?

[carltongibson]

Once Channels passes down to ASGIHandler it is using the Django stack.

Otherwise in consumer code, you can decide whether you need thread_sensitive when using sync_to_async() (but if you're using the ORM, you do.)