any issues with long running python apps?

[William Heymann]

On Friday 09 July 2010, Les Schaffer wrote:
> but none of this has anything to do with Python itself. i am sure python
> servers have been running reliably for long periods of time, but i've
> never had to deal with a two-month guarantee before.  is there something
> else i am missing here that i should be concerned about on the
> pure-Python side of things? something under the hood of the python
> interpreter that could be problematic when run for a long time?
> 
> or need we only concern ourselves with the nuts behind the wheel:that
> is, we the developers?
> 
> thanks
> 
> Les

I have been running zope apps for about 10 years now and they normally run for 
many months between being restarted so python has no inherent problems with 
running that long. Your specific python program might though.

You have to make sure you don't have any reference leaks so your program keeps 
growing in memory but you also have to deal with windows. The program can not 
be any more reliable then the os it is running on. Personally I would never 
make a guarantee like that on a windows box. I would have to hand choose every 
piece of hardware and run some kind of unix on it with a guarantee like that.

Last I ran a program for a long time on windows it ran into some kind of 
address space fragmentation and eventually it would die on windows. There is 
some kind of problem with the windows VM system. 64bit windows will solve that 
mostly by having an address space so large you can't fragment it enough to 
kill the program in any reasonable time frame. If your program is not 
allocating and destroying large data structures all the time you probably 
don't have to worry about that but you do have to test it.