interpreter crashes

[Anthony Baxter]

>>> Paul Rubin wrote
>  I believe I've
> had about 4 crashes and saved core dumps from two of them.

I'd have to agree with the other posters that typically Python is
rock solid, but there are occasionally obscure little bugs that will
leap up and bite you. 
 
> OK.  I'll see if I can upload the dumps to an online server, then open
> a SourceForge bug.

If you can put the gdb backtraces there as well, it will make people's life
easier.

> 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).

Sure - at the moment I've got a wierd little obscure bug in Python2.1.1
that's triggered by Zope. I'm running with a ZEO-server/ZEO-clients setup,
so I'm running the ZEO server (which needs to stay up) with a nogc version
of 2.1.1, and the ZEO clients (which need GC to handle the RestrictedPython
code) with the gc-enabled version of python. Occasionally (about every 12-24
hours of runtime) a ZEO client will crash, but as they're behind a load
balancer, it's invisible to the end user.

Anthony

-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>   
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.