[pypy-dev] pypy MemoryError crash

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Roger,

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 18:58, Roger Flores <aidembb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Were either of you able to confirm that it's easy to make PyPy crash with a
> MemoryError?

Ah, I missed the fact that you replied to us privately.  That's
generally a very bad idea, because if we are busy or forget about your
bug, others would normally jump in.

I'm not able to reproduce the bug you have: on my machine, compressing
works fine, but decompressing consumes (slowly) more and more memory.
I guess that this behavior is unexpected, unless you really have a
reason.  The point is that I'm running out of RAM (2GB total) before
seeing any crash.  I guess that the crash depends very finely on how
much free memory+swap you have.

Can you tell us these numbers?  I could try to reproduce the crash
using "ulimit", if necessary on machines with more RAM.  However,
looking carefully at the traceback, it is in theory possible to get it
if the programs just fits in the memory, and tries to quit, calling
the shut-down functions.  These shut-down functions might need to
allocate a little bit more.  If this triggers collection, and if
collection raises MemoryError, then we could get such a traceback.


A bientôt,

Armin.