[Twisted-Python] Freezing Ampoule or the Invasion of Infinite Zombie Processes

[Burak Nehbit]

Hi everyone, 

It seems that I ran into a rather inextricable problem, would love to see what you think.

As you might remember, I have been working on a distributed, anonymous community platform(s) called Aether ( www.getaether.net ) which is largely a Twisted codebase in its networking system. After releasing the app, I ended up with performance problems, in some part due to my programming incompetence, and some part because I was also using it to drive a GUI with qtreactor, which ran its own Javascript interpreter.

The codebase is largely cleaned up now and the current architecture of the program involves two processes that talk to each other via Ampoule: a default reactor core, which handles network events, and a qtreactor which is solely concerned with the user interface. It works very well. Stress induced by networking does not slow down the UI and vice versa. 

The problem here is that I can’t freeze and package the app via PyInstaller to release it. What happens is that when I run the packaged application, the application starts to spawn an infinite amount of copies of itself. This seems to be the default behaviour of Ampoule, in when a worker process (my GUI) fails, it spawns a new one. 

1) How can I disable this feature? I want ampoule to not restart a failed worker process. 

2) How can I get information about what’s going wrong in the worker process? I am using a custom bootstrap code, and it seems that even if I deliver an empty bootstrap code to make it a noop, the process still fails and a new one is spawned. Or to be more accurate, just a new process is spawned, I don’t know whether if it is failing, but nothing happens on spawned processes, none of them start to show GUI or any other signs of life. 

If I don’t force quit my frozen app, it will create an increasing number of zombie processes. 

I have Twisted logging set up in the GUI process, but it doesn’t even hit that line, so I get no exceptions or any message of any kind. It fails even with empty bootstrap code. 

Any idea on how to approach this problem? I have nothing to start with , so anything would be appreciated. I’m reading the source code of Ampoule but found nothing useful so far. 

The non-frozen version of the app works fine. I also have a prior version of the app that can be packaged, so there’s nothing wrong with my Twisted code that can’t be packaged. It’s Ampoule that is newly added, and so far resisting the refrigerator.

Best regards,
Burak






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