Note: threadframe is obsolete. Python 2.5 and later include a function sys._current_frames() that does the same thing. Threadframe is only useful for Python 2.2 through 2.4.

Rationale

I was encountering deadlocks in a multi-threaded CORBA server (implemented using omniORB). Debugging using GDB gave me too low-level information, and what I needed was an equivalent of the GDB command “info threads”. There was no such facility available from within Python’s standard library, so I rolled my own.

David Beazley added advanced debugging functions to the Python interpreter, and they have been folded into the 2.2 release.

I used these hooks to build a debugging module that is useful when you are looking for deadlocks in a multithreaded application. It basically has a single function that will return a list of the stack frames for all Python interpreter threads in the process.

Guido van Rossum added in Python 2.3 the thread ID to the interpreter state structure, and this allows us to produce a dictionary mapping thread IDs to frames.

This functionality is now integrated in Python 2.5’s batteries-included sys._current_frames() function.

Of course, I disclaim any liability if this code should crash your system, erase your homework, eat your dog (who also ate your homework) or otherwise have any undesirable effect.

Building and installing

Python 2.2 or later is required. Thread ID to frame dictionary extraction is only available in Python 2.3 and later, and will generate a NotImplementedError if used from 2.2.

Download the source tarball threadframe-0.2.tar.gz. You can use the Makefile or directly with the setup.py script. I have built and tested this only on Solaris 8/x86 and Windows 2000, but the code should be pretty portable. There is a small test program test.py that illustrates how to use this module to dump stack frames of all the Python interpreter threads. A sample run is available for your perusal.

For Windows users, I have available pre-compiled binaries, built using Mingw32 and GCC 2.95.2. Just copy the file threadframe.pyd in any location in your Python path and you should be able to run the test script test.py.

License

This code is licensed under the same terms as Python itself.

Change history

Release 0.2 (2004-06-10)

Distutils based setup.py contributed by Bob Ippolito. Bob also noticed that thread_id was added to the Python interpreter state, and contributed a patch to get a dictionary mapping thread_ids to frames instead of a list.

Release 0.1 (2002-10-11)

Initial release for Python 2.2: threadframe-0.1.tar.gz