Is this a bug in multiprocessing or in my script?

[sturlamolden]

On 5 Aug, 22:07, Piet van Oostrum <p... at cs.uu.nl> wrote:

> Calling os.exit in a child process may be dangerous. It can cause
> unflushed buffers to be flushed twice: once in the parent and once in
> the child.

I assume you mean sys.exit. If this is the case, multiprocessing needs
a mechanism to chose between os._exit and sys.exit for child
processes. Calling os._exit might also be dangerous because it could
prevent necessary clean-up code from executing  (e.g. in C
extensions). I had a case where shared memory on Linux (System V IPC)
leaked due to os._exit. The deallocator for my extension type never
got to execute in child processes. The deallocator was needed to
release the shared segment when its reference count dropped to 0.
Changing to sys.exit solved the problem. On Windows there was no leak,
because the kernel did the reference counting.