interpreter crashes

[Paul Rubin]

Anthony Baxter <anthony at interlink.com.au> writes:
> > OK.  I'll see if I can upload the dumps to an online server, then open
> > a SourceForge bug.
> 
> If you can put the gdb backtraces there as well, it will make people's life
> easier.

The backtraces aren't very informative.  The evaluator is crashing,
almost certainly due to data corruption having happened sometime earlier.
But sure, I'll include them.

> Sure - at the moment I've got a wierd little obscure bug in Python2.1.1
> that's triggered by Zope. I'm running with a ZEO-server/ZEO-clients setup,
> so I'm running the ZEO server (which needs to stay up) with a nogc version
> of 2.1.1, and the ZEO clients (which need GC to handle the RestrictedPython
> code) with the gc-enabled version of python. Occasionally (about every 12-24
> hours of runtime) a ZEO client will crash, but as they're behind a load
> balancer, it's invisible to the end user.

I'm not sure what RestrictedPython is--something different from Rexec?
A 3rd party extension module?  If you're getting crashes that
frequently that's closer to reproducability than what I've seen so
far.  Maybe you can add some instrumentation to find out what's
causing the crashes.  One of the malloc tracing libraries might be
a reasonable place to start.  

I've also been wondering whether it could make sense to modify the gc
to check the correctness of all ref counts when the gc runs.  However
I haven't yet looked at the gc code enough to tell whether this is practical.