Deadlock detection

[Mike Meyer]

Adam DePrince <adam at cognitcorp.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 06:21, Duncan Grisby wrote: 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Does anyone know of a deadlock detector for Python?  I don't think it
>> would be too hard to hook into the threading module and instrument
>> mutexes so they can be tested for deadlocks. I've googled around but I
>> haven't found anything.
>
> In general, accurate deadlock detection is intractable.  Like many
> problems of this class you have two choices - either reduce the scope of
> the problem to a non-general one or try a heuristic to guess.  

I've recently been involved in a thread on another list that dealt
with the problems of programming with threads. There are people
approaching the problems (including deadlocks) by providing constructs
for threading that mean you can't write such code. At least, that's
the idea.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2004_04/article6 was posted as one
such solution. I'm not convinced it works, but the paper only
discusses half the solution.

          <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.