Python reliability

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:00:04 +0300, Ville Voipio wrote:

> I would need to make some high-reliability software
> running on Linux in an embedded system. Performance
> (or lack of it) is not an issue, reliability is.

[snip]

> The software should be running continously for 
> practically forever (at least a year without a reboot).
> Is the Python interpreter (on Linux) stable and
> leak-free enough to achieve this?

If performance is really not such an issue, would it really matter if you
periodically restarted Python? Starting Python takes a tiny amount of time:

$ time python -c pass
real    0m0.164s
user    0m0.021s
sys     0m0.015s

If performance isn't an issue, your users may not even care about ten
times that delay even once an hour. In other words, built your software to
deal gracefully with restarts, and your users won't even notice or care if
it restarts.

I'm not saying that you will need to restart Python once an hour, or even
once a month. But if you did, would it matter? What's more important is
the state of the operating system. (I'm assuming that, with a year uptime
the requirements, you aren't even thinking of WinCE.)


-- 
Steven.