[Python-Dev] Counting collisions for the win

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Jan 20 18:43:27 CET 2012


On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 8:06 PM, Ivan Kozik <ivan at ludios.org> wrote:

> No, I wasn't happy with termination.  I wanted to treat it just like a
> JSON decoding error, and send the appropriate response.
>

So was this attack actually being mounted on your service regularly? I'd
think it would be sufficient to treat it as a MemoryError -- unavoidable,
if it happens things are really bad, and hopefully you'll crash quickly and
some monitor process restarts your service. That's a mechanism that you
should have anyway.


> I actually forgot to mention the main reason I abandoned the
> stop-at-N-collisions approach.  I had a server with a dict that stayed
> in memory, across many requests.  It was being populated with
> identifiers chosen by clients.  I couldn't have my server stay broken
> if this dict filled up with a bunch of colliding keys.  (I don't think
> I could have done another thing either, like nuke the dict or evict
> some keys.)
>

What would your service do if it ran out of memory?

Maybe one tweak to the collision counting would be that the exception needs
to inherit from BaseException (like MemoryError) so most generic exception
handlers don't actually handle it. (Style note: never use "except:", always
use "except Exception:".)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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