pyheapdump

Post-mortem debugging for Python.

Documentation

Please read the source or create the html-documentation using the following command:

python setup.py build_sphinx

Acknowledgement and Previous Work

This Python extension is based on the Pydump (https://github.com/gooli/pydump), a Python extension written and published by Eli Finer. During the development of pyheapdump my code diverged from Eli's work to a point where nearly no common code was left. I decided, to rename my work to pyheapdump in order to make it clear, that it is now a separate project.

Changelog

2016-08-01 Version 0.2.8:

• Fix an "OverflowError: signed integer is greater than maximum" in lock_function on non Stackless 64bit platforms.

2016-02-19 Version 0.2.7:

• Post mortem debugging no works with PyDev versions >= 4.5.0 too. Previously only PyDev versions < 4.5.0 were supported.

2015-08-25 Version 0.2.6:

• Don't break the Python class pickle.Unpickler. Previous versions of pyheapdump modified the dispatch table of class Unpickler.

2015-08-25 Version 0.2.5:

• Support Pydev versions 3.7 and up (tested with version 4.3.0).

2014-07-25 Version 0.2.4:

• Fix a trivial bug introduced in 0.2.3: crash, if PYHEAPDUMP_DIR is unset.

2014-07-25 Version 0.2.3:

• Rewrote the unpickle surrogate mechanism. Now the surrogate classes resemble the original classes and support operations used during unpickling.

• Setting the environmnet variable PYHEAPDUMP_DIR to "disable" disables pyheapdump.

• Pydevd only: print the exception to the debugger console.

2014-07-13 Version 0.2.2:

• Add an option to control the inclusion of python source into the dump. If you use dump_on_unhandled_exceptions you can use the environment variable PYHEAPDUMP_WITH_FILES=no to exclude files. Read the documentation of dump_on_unhandled_exceptions for additional options.

• If you use PyDev to analyse a dump and a python source file is not available, PyDev now extracts the source from the dump. (Eventually you have to enable the action "Get from server (read only)" in the PyDev Source Locator preferences: Menu "Window" -> "Preferences" -> "PyDev" -> "Run/Debug" -> "Source Locator" -> "Action when source is not directly found".)

2014-07-12 Version 0.2.1:

• Work around Python bug http://bugs.python.org/issue21967. It used to crash the Python interpreter under certain conditions.

• Added examples in the directory examples.

• Added a lock to prevent simultaneous dumps from multiple threads. Function save_dump now returns the file name and the headers. If the file name comtains the sub-string '{sequence_number}', it is replaced by the running number of the dump.

• New function dump_on_unhandled_exceptions. It can be used as a function decorator or to setup a sys.execpthook handler. The environment variable PYHEAPDUMP_DIR defines the dump directory.

• Rewrite of the thread/tasklet locking to avoid dead locks.

• Disable logging during the creation of the pickle. This prevents secondary errors, if the log system is the cause of heap dump. Requires a new sPickle package.

• Improved readability of the dump file format.

• New command line interface. See "python -m pyheapdump --help" for details.

• Work around for Stackless bug #61 while unpickling heap dumps. Previously Stackless used to crash, if you inspect the local variables of certain frames.

2014-05-09 Version 0.2:

• New dump file format (RFC 2045 MIME-message, content type 'application/x.python-heapdump').

2014-02-11 Version 0.1.1:

• Updated documentation
• Minor API extensions