interpreter crashes

[Paul Rubin]

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> writes:
> Are you running with any extension modules (incl. any sort of GUI pkg)?  Are
> you running threads?  Refcount problems in extension modules (others' or
> especially your own) are historically the #1 cause of crashes.  Thread races
> seemingly unique to a specific platform are #2.  Cyclic gc caused a few
> nasty cases when it was new, but we don't see reports of crashes due to that
> anymore.

No threads.  No GUI.  No extension modules that didn't come with Python,
but using a few that came with Python.  I guess I could figure out from
the core dumps which modules were loaded at the time.  I believe I've
had about 4 crashes and saved core dumps from two of them.

> > Anyone got any suggestions?
> 
> Without a reproducible problem in hand, or even a characterization of one,
> guess <wink>.

Unfortunately, I don't know any way to reproduce a crash.  It's only
happened a few times, at random.

> > Want to see the core dumps?
> 
> If you open a SoureForge bug report, someone may.

OK.  I'll see if I can upload the dumps to an online server, then open
a SourceForge bug.
 
> If Python were in the habit of crashing randomly, I'd advise not
> using it at all.

Mumble mumble fault-tolerant design mumble... yes, it's best not to
crash, but in an imperfect world it's sometimes still appropriate to
build software (and hardware) to withstand occasional crashes
(e.g. Apache).

Thanks for the reply.