The reliability of python threads

Klaas mike.klaas at gmail.com
Wed Jan 24 18:59:16 EST 2007



On Jan 24, 10:43 am, "Carl J. Van Arsdall" <cvanarsd... at mvista.com>
wrote:
> Chris Mellon wrote:
> > On 24 Jan 2007 18:21:38 GMT, Nick Maclaren <n... at cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >> [snip]
>
> > I'm aware of the issues with the POSIX threading model. I still stand
> > by my statement - bringing up the problems with the provability of
> > correctness in the POSIX model amounts to FUD in a discussion of
> > actual problems with actual code.
>
> > Logic and programming errors in user code are far more likely to be
> > the cause of random errors in a threaded program than theoretical
> > (I've never come across a case in practice) issues with the POSIX
> > standard.Yea, typically I would think that.  The problem I am seeing is
> incredibly intermittent.  Like a simple pyro server that gives me a
> problem maybe every three or four months.  Just something funky will
> happen to the state of the whole thing, some bad data, i'm having an
> issue tracking it down and some more experienced programmers mentioned
> that its most likely a race condition.  THe thing is, I'm really not
> doing anything too crazy, so i'm having difficult tracking it down.  I
> had heard in the past that there may be issues with threads, so I
> thought to investigate this side of things.
>
> It still proves difficult, but reassurance of the threading model helps
> me focus my efforts.
>
> > Emphasizing this means that people will tend to ignore bugs as being
> > "the fault of POSIX" rather than either auditing their code more
> > carefully, or avoiding threads entirely (the second being what I
> > suspect your goal is).
>
> > As a last case, I should point out that while the POSIX memory model
> > can't be proven safe, concrete implementations do not necessarily
> > suffer from this problem.Would you consider the Linux implementation of threads to be concrete?
>
> -carl
>
> --
>
> Carl J. Van Arsdall
> cvanarsd... at mvista.com
> Build and Release
> MontaVista Software




More information about the Python-list mailing list