• Tim Peters's avatar
    An Anonymous Coward on c.l.py posted a little program with bizarre · 2e7e7df9
    Tim Peters yazdı
    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.
    2e7e7df9
thread_nt.h 8.04 KB