Race condition when generating .pyc files

[Steve Holden]

yogamatt1970 at gmail.com wrote:
> I have a large body of Python code which runs on many different (Unix)
> machines concurrently.  Part of the code lives in one place, but most
> of it lives in directories which I find at runtime.  I only have one
> copy of each Python source file and I think I'm hitting a race
> condition where two hosts attempt to import the same module at the
> same time.  My import fails on one of the machines and the following
> exception is thrown:
> EOFError: EOF read where object expected
> My hypothesis is that there's contention between the two (or more)
> hosts when the module's .pyc file is generated.
> 
> Possible solutions I see:
> 1) Running a cron job before my code executes which compiles all the
> python source first.
> 2) Making separate copies of all the .py files for each host running
> the code - I'd rather not do this, it seems like a big pain.
> 3) Inhibiting the generation of .pyc files altogether if that's even
> possible - I saw a PEP for a possible -R flag (http://www.python.org/
> dev/peps/pep-0304/) but I don't think it has been added to a released
> version of Python yet plus I am stuck with Python 2.4 for the time
> being.
> 
> Any and all help appreciated.

Are you using the same version of Python on all the hosts that are using
the code? If not, the different versions will be forever arguing about
whether the .pyc files need recompiling.

Just a thought ...

regards
 Steve
-- 
Steve Holden        +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC              http://www.holdenweb.com/