Delaney, Timothy (Tim) wrote:
Meding (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:
I am a bit surprised that nobody else has tried running the short
Python program above on a hyper-threading or dual core / dual
processor system.
Does it happen every time? Have you tried it on multiple machines? Is it
possible that that one machine is having problems? Does it take the same
amount of time each run to replicate - and if so, how long is that (give
or take a minute)?
Until you can answer these questions with definite answers, people are
not going to dedicate machines *that they use* for hours on end trying
to replicate it. And from this thread, the time required appears to be
"minutes to hours". That suggests you have a race condition which
results in a deadlock - and of course, that is more likely to occur on a
dual-core or dual-cpu machine, as you really have multiple threads
executing at once.
The test program in question doesn't require a dedicated machine and it
doesn't consume a lot of CPU resources since it sleeps most of the
time.
I'm surprised that so many people have been willing to dedicate as much
time as they have, but then again considering the people involved it's
not quite so surprising.
This "problem" doesn't require more time than any other in
comp.lang.python which I try to help to resolve. In fact, since P is
not a newbie, it took less time than some newbie questions.

8 May 2006 15:44:04 -0700, "Serge " <S (AT) gmail (DOT) com>
declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:

The test program in question doesn't require a dedicated machine and it
doesn't consume a lot of CPU resources since it sleeps most of the
time.

Yet Do we have any evidence that other activity on the machine
may or may not affect the situation? There is a big difference between
leaving a machine idle for a few hours to see if it hangs, vs doing
normal activities with a process in the background (and what about
screen savers? network activity?)

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
8 May 2006 15:44:04 -0700, "Serge " <S (AT) gmail (DOT) com>
declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:
--
The test program in question doesn't require a dedicated machine and it
doesn't consume a lot of CPU resources since it sleeps most of the
time.

Yet Do we have any evidence that other activity on the machine
may or may not affect the situation? There is a big difference between
leaving a machine idle for a few hours to see if it hangs, vs doing
normal activities with a process in the background (and what about
screen savers? network activity?)

But what if other processes will actually help to trigger the bug? IMH
both situations (idle or busy) are equal if you don't know what's going
on.