Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Test suite failures on Linux #2

Closed
giampaolo opened this issue May 23, 2014 · 5 comments
Closed

Test suite failures on Linux #2

giampaolo opened this issue May 23, 2014 · 5 comments

Comments

@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner

From [email protected] on January 13, 2009 21:20:35

root@ubuntu:/home/user/psutil/test# python -V
Python 2.5.2
root@ubuntu:/home/user/psutil/test# uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.27-7-server #1 SMP Fri Oct 24 07:37:55 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
root@ubuntu:/home/user/psutil/test# python test_psutil.py
test_args (__main__.TestCase) ... FAIL
test_get_process_list (__main__.TestCase) ... ok
test_kill (__main__.TestCase) ... ok
test_name (__main__.TestCase) ... FAIL
test_path (__main__.TestCase) ... FAIL
test_pid (__main__.TestCase) ... ok

======================================================================
FAIL: test_args (__main__.TestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_psutil.py", line 54, in test_args
    self.assertEqual(psutil.Process(self.proc.pid).args, [sys.executable])
AssertionError: None != ['/usr/bin/python']

======================================================================
FAIL: test_name (__main__.TestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_psutil.py", line 62, in test_name
    os.path.basename(sys.executable))
AssertionError: 'python2.5' != 'python'

======================================================================
FAIL: test_path (__main__.TestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_psutil.py", line 47, in test_path
    self.assertEqual(psutil.Process(self.proc.pid).path, sys.executable)
AssertionError: '/usr/bin/python2.5' != '/usr/bin/python'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 6 tests in 0.436s

FAILED (failures=3)

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/psutil/issues/detail?id=2

@giampaolo giampaolo self-assigned this May 23, 2014
@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner Author

From [email protected] on January 22, 2009 10:14:47

Note: tests fail only if I use "python test_psutil.py" as command line.
By using "python2.5 test_psutil.py" all goes fine.
We should find a way to have them working by using both "python" or "python2.x".

@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner Author

From [email protected] on January 22, 2009 10:32:15

The test code is very rudimentary in its current state and should only be 
a placeholder. Prior to release the test code needs to be rewritten, possibly 
popen() or similar to launch known processes with known arguments to compare 
the output of psutil. The current method of using sys.executable etc is not 
accurate enough for all cases to be considered a reliable test.

@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner Author

From [email protected] on January 22, 2009 12:20:49

Fixed in r46 .
All tests now pass on Linux.

Status: Fixed

@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner Author

From [email protected] on January 27, 2009 09:53:27

Labels: Milestone-0.1.0

@giampaolo
Copy link
Owner Author

From g.rodola on March 02, 2013 03:35:55

Updated csets after the SVN -> Mercurial migration: r46 == revision ac061852e83f

giampaolo added a commit that referenced this issue May 12, 2020
Preamble
=======

We have a [memory leak test suite](https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil/blob/e1ea2bccf8aea404dca0f79398f36f37217c45f6/psutil/tests/__init__.py#L897), which calls a function many times and fails if the process memory increased. We do this in order to detect missing `free()` or `Py_DECREF` calls in the C modules. When we do, then we have a memory leak.

The problem
==========

A problem we've been having for probably over 10 years, is the false positives. That's because the memory fluctuates. Sometimes it may increase (or even decrease!) due to how the OS handles memory, the Python's garbage collector, the fact that RSS is an approximation and who knows what else. So thus far we tried to compensate that by using the following logic:
- warmup (call fun 10 times)
- call the function many times (1000)
- if memory increased before/after calling function 1000 times, then keep calling it for another 3 secs
- if it still increased at all (> 0) then fail

This logic didn't really solve the problem, as we still had occasional false positives, especially lately on FreeBSD. 

The solution
=========

This PR changes the internal algorithm so that in case of failure (mem > 0 after calling fun() N times) we retry the test for up to 5 times, increasing N (repetitions) each time, so we consider it a failure only if the memory **keeps increasing** between runs. So for instance, here's a legitimate failure:

```
psutil.tests.test_memory_leaks.TestModuleFunctionsLeaks.test_disk_partitions ... 
Run #1: extra-mem=696.0K, per-call=3.5K, calls=200
Run #2: extra-mem=1.4M, per-call=3.5K, calls=400
Run #3: extra-mem=2.1M, per-call=3.5K, calls=600
Run #4: extra-mem=2.7M, per-call=3.5K, calls=800
Run #5: extra-mem=3.4M, per-call=3.5K, calls=1000
FAIL
```

If, on the other hand, the memory increased on one run (say 200 calls) but decreased on the next run (say 400 calls), then it clearly means it's a false positive, because memory consumption may be > 0 on second run, but if it's lower than the previous run with less repetitions, then it cannot possibly represent a leak (just a fluctuation):

```
psutil.tests.test_memory_leaks.TestModuleFunctionsLeaks.test_net_connections ... 
Run #1: extra-mem=568.0K, per-call=2.8K, calls=200
Run #2: extra-mem=24.0K, per-call=61.4B, calls=400
OK
```

Note about mallinfo()
================

Aka #1275. `mallinfo()` on Linux is supposed to provide memory metrics about how many bytes gets allocated on the heap by `malloc()`, so it's supposed to be way more precise than RSS and also [USS](http://grodola.blogspot.com/2016/02/psutil-4-real-process-memory-and-environ.html). In another branch were I exposed it, I verified that fluctuations still occur even when using `mallinfo()` though, despite less often. So that means even `mallinfo()` would not grant 100% stability.
mayeut added a commit to mayeut/psutil that referenced this issue Jun 15, 2024
mayeut added a commit to mayeut/psutil that referenced this issue Jun 15, 2024
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant