What causes a Python segmentation fault

Question

I am implementing Kosaraju s Strong Connected Component SCC  graph search algorithm in Python   The program runs great on small data set  but when I run it on a super-large graph  more than 800 000 nodes   it says  Segmentation Fault    What might be the cause of it  Thank you     Additional Info  First I got this Error when running on the super-large data set    RuntimeError  maximum recursion depth exceeded in cmp    Then  I reset the recursion limit using  sys setrecursionlimit 50000    but got a  Segmentation fault   Believe me it s not a infinite loop  it runs correct on relatively smaller data  It is possible the program exhausted the resources

User · Answer

Updating the ulimit worked for my Kosaraju's SCC implementation by fixing the segfault on both Python (Python segfault.. who knew!) and C++ implementations.

For my MAC, I found out the possible maximum via :

$ ulimit -s -H
65532

User · Answer

Google search found me this article  and I did not see the following  personal solution  discussed     My recent annoyance with Python 3 7 on Windows Subsystem for Linux is that  on two machines with the same Pandas library  one gives me segmentation fault and the other reports warning  It was not clear which one was newer  but  re-installing  pandas solves the problem    Command that I ran on the buggy machine   conda install pandas   More details  I was running identical scripts  synced through Git   and both are Windows 10 machine with WSL   Anaconda  Here go the screenshots to make the case  Also  on the machine where command-line python will complain about Segmentation fault  core dumped   Jupyter lab simply restarts the kernel every single time  Worse still  no warning was given at all       Updates a few months later  I quit hosting Jupyter servers on Windows machine  I now use WSL on Windows to fetch remote ports opened on a Linux server and run all my jobs on the remote Linux machine  I have never experienced any execution error for a good number of months

User · Answer

This happens when a python extension  written in C  tries to access a memory beyond reach   You can trace it in following ways    Add sys settrace at the very first line of the code  Use gdb as described by Mark in this answer   At the command prompt  gdb python  gdb  run  path to script py    wait for segfault     gdb  backtrace    stack trace of the c code

User · Answer

Looks like you are out of stack memory  You may want to increase it as Davide stated  To do it in python code  you would need to run your  main    using threading   def main        pass   write your code here  sys setrecursionlimit 2097152       adjust numbers threading stack size 134217728      for your needs  main thread   threading Thread target main  main thread start   main thread join     Source  c1729 s post on codeforces  Runing it with PyPy is a bit trickier

User · Answer

I understand you ve solved your issue  but for others reading this thread  here is the answer  you have to increase the stack that your operating system allocates for the python process   The way to do it  is operating system dependant  In linux  you can check with the command ulimit -s your current value and you can increase it with ulimit -s  lt new value gt   Try doubling the previous value and continue doubling if it does not work  until you find one that does or run out of memory

User · Answer

I was experiencing this segmentation fault after upgrading dlib on RPI   I tracebacked the stack as suggested by Shiplu Mokaddim above and it settled on an OpenBLAS library   Since OpenBLAS is also multi-threaded  using it in a muilt-threaded application will exponentially multiply threads until segmentation fault  For multi-threaded applications  set OpenBlas to single thread mode   In python virtual environment  tell OpenBLAS to only use a single thread by editing         workon  lt myenv gt        nano  virtualenv  lt myenv gt  bin postactivate   and add       export OPENBLAS NUM THREADS 1      export OPENBLAS MAIN FREE 1   After reboot I was able to run all my image recognition apps on rpi3b which were previously crashing it   reference  https   github com ageitgey face recognition issues 294

User · Answer

Segmentation fault is a generic one  there are many possible reasons for this    Low memory Faulty Ram memory Fetching a huge data set from the db using a query  if the size of fetched data is more than swap mem  wrong query   buggy code having long loop  multiple recursion

[python] What causes a Python segmentation fault?

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