[issue18843] Py_FatalError (msg=0x7f0e3b373232 "bad leading pad byte") at Python-2.7.5/Python/pythonrun.c:1689

[Tim Peters]

Tim Peters added the comment:

Memory corruption can be difficult to track down.  Best thing you can do is strive to find a test case as small and fast as possible that shows the same kind of error.

By "rogue extension module" I just mean 3rd-party C code (like, for example, matplotlib).

I doubt it's a hardware problem.  That's possible, of course, but these kinds of errors are almost always the result of errors in C code.

The stacktrace probably isn't helpful.  All we know is that memory got corrupted _sometime_ between someone asking for a block of memory and releasing it.  The corruption may have happened a millisecond ago, or weeks ago (if the program ran that long) - there's no way to tell by the time the memory corruption is _detected_.

About "object counter overflows", I'm not sure what you're asking.  Python doesn't have an object counter.  The "serial number" in debug-mode allocators just counts the number of times a debug-mode malloc has been called.  If that overflows, it would do no harm.

Bottom line:  no matter what's to blame here, the smaller & faster a test program you can find, the more likely it is to get fixed.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue18843>
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