AsyncHttpxClientWrapper creates task in destructor -> prevents usage in other threads

[stippi]

Confirm this is an issue with the Python library and not an underlying OpenAI API

• This is an issue with the Python library

Describe the bug

We have noticed strange exceptions being logged in the asyncio runtime about "close()" being called on an already closed client. It took us a while to understand what was going on, but it seems to all make sense now: We are creating a Python thread to do some processing which involves creating OpenAI client instances to make completion requests. When the destructor creates a task, the thread context will be the garbage collector, which is the main thread, not the thread which created the client.

To Reproduce

1. Create a thread in python
2. Use for example asyncio.run() to call an async function which eventually uses an OpenAI client to make a completion request.
3. Observe strange exceptions about clients being closed that are already closed.

Code snippets

OS

any

Python version

Python 3.12

Library version

openai v1.93.0

[RobertCraigie]

Thanks for the report, can you share more information about your setup?

I'm under the impression that you should not be mixing sync and async together. As you're using threads, why are you using the async client?

[stippi]

I understand your question, and we have since rewritten this code to run in a task instead of using a thread. However, asyncio clearly supports run loops in different threads and as far as I understand, there are valid use cases for mixing threads and async apps. The assumption in the destructor is that the AsyncHttpxClientWrapper has been created on the main thread's run loop and that just seems incorrect.