[Zope-dev] Another Signal 11 Question

[Tom Jenkins]

On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 10:34, Alex Kelly wrote:
> I too have been having a lot of restarts with error code 11.  After 
> reading some other comments relating to this, I recompiled Python 2.1.1 
> with the "--without-pymalloc" option.  I have not yet seen any problems 
> from doing this, but my questions are:  Is this the preferred method to 
> fix the Sig 11 restarts?  Are there any other options? Are there any 
> consequences to running zope without py_malloc?
> 

Very briefly and as i've gathered from mailing lists/archives.  pymalloc
was added in to python to compensate sub-par malloc functions in some
Windows platforms (primarily Win98).  after analysis it was determined
that the majority of the folks downloading python were for windows, so
the pymalloc option became the default.  

however there appears to be a bug in pymalloc that surfaces if you have
a lot of RAM on your system (ours have 2-4GB).  this bug caused server
stability problems for us when using zope.  if you recompile python
without pymalloc then python will use the OS's malloc functions.

we run under Linux so pymalloc is not really necessary for us.  after
making this change the vast majority of the stability problems
disappeared.  then, after working with Federico on pyscopg, we upgraded
to the latest version of psycopg and the last of our stability problems
went away.  this is with zope 2.4.1

-- 

Tom Jenkins
Development InfoStructure
http://www.devis.com