[Twisted-Python] strange server crash

[Christopher Armstrong]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Itamar Shtull-Trauring
<itamar at itamarst.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-03-21 at 20:02 -0700, Alec Matusis wrote:
>
>>           File "/nail/live/im/myserv/service.py", line 1199, in logout
>>
>>             if self.nick in session.sellers:
>>
>>         exceptions.AttributeError: WLResultSet instance has no
>> attribute 'sellers'
>>
>>
>>
>> This last error repeated about 1000 times for different clients, after
>> which the segfault occurred.
>>
>> The problem is, that “session” is an instance of a Session class that
>> is defined in the code, it is NEITHER a Deferred NOR an instance  of
>> WLResultSet class- these are completely different classes, and there’s
>> no possible way in the code for variable session to become an instance
>> of Deferred.
>
> I've seen this happen - once. My guess then was memory corruption of
> some sort (somewhere in the C level). If you have any custom C
> extensions you might want to try valgrind.

I'd like to offer a slightly stronger suggestion that this segfault is
not the fault of any pure Python code (such as Twisted), but rather
some C extension that you're using, or perhaps a bug in the Python
runtime itself. The weird attribute errors for the wrong classes are
probably caused by memory corruption leading up to the segfault.


-- 
Christopher Armstrong
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