[Numpy-discussion] strange seterr persistence between sessions

[John Hunter]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 13:56, John Hunter <jdh2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In trying to track down a bug in matplotlib, I have come across tsome
>> very strange numpy behavior.  Basically, whether or not I call
>> np.seterr('raise') or not in a matplotlib demo affects the behavior of
>> seterr in another (pure numpy) script, run in a separate process.
>> Something about the numpy state is persisting between python sessions.
>>  This appears to be platform specific, because I have only been able
>> to verify it on 1 platform (quad code xeon 64 bit running fedora) but
>> not on another (solaris x86).
>
> Can you make a new, smaller self-contained example? I suspect stale .pyc files.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by self-contained (since the
behavior requires at least two files).  Do you mean trying to come up
with two numpy only examples files, or one that does away with the npy
file?  Or both....  As for the stale files, I'm not sure what you are
thinking but these are clean builds and installs of numpy and mpl.

So if you'll give me a little more guidance in terms of what you are
looking for in a self contained example, I'll be happy to try and put
it together.  But I am not sure what it is about the loading of the
geo_demo that is triggering the behavior (numpy extension code, large
memory footprint, ??).  I tried running a python snippet that would
fill a lot of memory to see if that would clear the persistence.  I
was wondering if there is some kernel memory caching and some empty
numpy memory that is not getting initialized properly and thus is
picking up some memory from a prior session) but it did not.

JDH