Comment 96 for bug 107188

There are specialized memory debugging tools, for example "valgrind".
If any attempt to allocate memory would fail, I would suspect that
valgrind would be able to give a nice stack trace. (recompile python
without optimization & with debugging symbols!)

refer to http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6556 for a more detailed
article on the subject.

On 11/6/07, Michael Vogt <email address hidden> wrote:
> @BigPick: Thanks for your analysis of the patch, when I read it I was
> wondering what change in it might have caused that the problem got
> fixed. My current theory is that the bug occur more or less random (or
> with a pattern that is very hard to reproduce) so that even if the patch
> itself has little effect, a upgrade test may still be successful because
> the bug is not triggered within this run. I'm currently trying to
> reproduce the problem with the virtualbox package in ubuntu. My current
> idea of reproducing it is to install kubuntu-feisty and try various
> combinations of stock kubuntu feisty install, install with updates, with
> backport enabled etc. Each time a snapshot is taken before the upgrade.
>
> I hope using this method we will be able to find a way to reliable
> trigger the bug. Everybody is welcome to help with the hunt :) (my main
> machine is currently not usable, so I'm a bit slower with those tests as
> I would otherwise). As for the debugging output, I think that strace is
> usually a good first step. If we could get a gziped strace log when the
> bug happend, that would be really cool. I suspect the actual problem
> lies somewhere under the python layer of the code (in the C/C++ bits),
> so pdb is probably not that helpful. gdb might, once we know a bit
> better what to look for.
>
> Cheers,
> Michael
>
> --
> [patch] Upgrade tool crashed with " Cannot allocate memory"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/107188
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