This is a script to clean up deadlocked Celery workers. I typically run it on servers every 15 minutes via cron.

celery_janitor.py

from celery.app.control import Control
import datetime
import psutil
import socket

def main():
    control = Control()
    inspect = control.inspect()
    hostname = socket.gethostname()

    print('Starting celery process cleanup ({0})'.format(datetime.datetime.now()))

    # Get the all of parent celery processes
    processes = psutil.get_process_list()
    celeryd_processes = [
        x for x in processes
            if x.name == 'celeryd'
                and x.parent
                and x.parent.name != 'celeryd'
    ]

    # Determine worker name on each process
    celeryd_process_lookup = {}
    for process in celeryd_processes:
        for arg in process.cmdline:
            if hostname in arg:
                worker_name = arg
                celeryd_process_lookup[worker_name] = process

    # Find workers that are still listening -- not dead
    good_workers = [x for x in inspect.ping().keys() if hostname in x]

    # Kill bad worker processes
    for worker in good_workers:
        celeryd_process_lookup[worker] = None
    for worker_name, process in celeryd_process_lookup.items():
        if process:
            print('Killing {worker_name} with PID of {pid}'.format(
                worker_name=worker_name,
                pid=process.pid
            ))
            process.kill()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()