Python 2.5 Core Dump on Solaris 8

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Melissa Evans schrieb:
> I've modified grappy.py,
> http://www.stacken.kth.se/~mattiasa/projects/grappy/, a postfix policy
> daemon for greylisting. to use LDAP as a backend instead of SQL (with
> python-ldap.)  The daemon runs fine when testing but when I put it under
> load it core dumps quickly.  What little analysis I know how to do shows
> similar information every time.  Any advice on where to go from here?

It looks like a memory allocation bug, e.g. caused by a double free,
or possibly a buffer overrun. It's unlikely that the Python interpreter
itself has such a bug, so it's likely rather caused in an extension
module (e.g. the ldap module).

Analysing such a problem is tedious. You should create a debug build
of Python (which already has some memory checks) and see whether it
reports anything. Then, you could try a debug malloc next (such
as dmalloc.com). If you have a license, you can use Purify, if not,
try Valgrind (not sure whether it runs on Solaris, though). Another
such library is ElectricFence.

Good luck,
Martin