An Anonymous Coward on c.l.py posted a little program with bizarre
behavior, creating many threads very quickly. A long debugging session
revealed that the Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread()
was choked with "laziness" errors:
1. It checked MS _beginthread() for a failure return, but when that
happened it returned heap trash as the function result, instead of
an id of -1 (the proper error-return value).
2. It didn't consider that the Win32 CreateSemaphore() can fail.
3. When creating a great many threads very quickly, it's quite possible
that any particular bootstrap call can take virtually any amount of
time to return. But the code waited for a maximum of 5 seconds, and
didn't check to see whether the semaphore it was waiting for got
signaled. If it in fact timed out, the function could again return
heap trash as the function result. This is actually what confused
the test program, as the heap trash usually turned out to be 0, and
then multiple threads all got id 0 simultaneously, confusing the
hell out of threading.py's _active dict (mapping id to thread
object). A variety of baffling behaviors followed from that.
WRT #1 and #2, error returns are checked now, and "thread.error: can't
start new thread" gets raised now if a new thread (or new semaphore)
can't be created. WRT #3, we now wait for the semaphore without a
timeout.
Also removed useless local vrbls, folded long lines, and changed callobj
to a stack auto (it was going thru malloc/free instead, for no discernible
reason).
Bugfix candidate.
2 files changed