Purify (tm) and Quantify (tm) are commercial software quality
-assurance tools available from Pure Atria Corporation
-<http://www.pureatria.com/>. Purify is essentially a memory access
+assurance tools available from Rational Software Corporation
+<http://www.rational.com/>. Purify is essentially a memory access
verifier and leak detector; Quantify is a C level profiler. The rest
of this file assumes you generally know how to use Purify and
Quantify, and that you have installed valid licenses for these
-products. If you don't have them installed, you can ignore the
+products. If you haven't installed such licenses, you can ignore the
following since it won't help you a bit!
You can easily build a Purify or Quantify instrumented version of the
-Python interpreter by passing the LINKCC variable to the make command
+Python interpreter by passing the PURIFY variable to the make command
at the top of the Python tree:
- make LINKCC='purify gcc'
+ make PURIFY=purify
-This assumes that the `purify' program is on your $PATH, and that you
-are using gcc as your C compiler. Note that you can't Purify and
-Quantify the interpreter (or any program) at the same time.
+This assumes that the `purify' program is on your $PATH. Note that
+you cannot both Purify and Quantify the Python interpreter (or any
+program for that matter) at the same time. If you want to build a
+Quantify'd interpreter, do this:
-Now, just run the interpreter as you normally would. If you're
-running it in place (i.e. not installed), you may find it helpful to
-set your PYTHONPATH environment variable. E.g., in Bourne Shell, on a
-Solaris 2.x machine:
-
- % PYTHONPATH=./Lib:./Lib/sunos5:./Lib/tkinter:./Modules ./python
+ make PURIFY=quantify
When running the regression test (make test), I have found it useful
-to set my PURIFYOPTIONS environment variable using the following shell
-function. Check out the Purify documentation for details:
+to set my PURIFYOPTIONS environment variable using the following
+(bash) shell function. Check out the Purify documentation for
+details:
p() {
chainlen='-chain-length=12'
value of 20 should get you the entire stack up into the Python C code
in all situations.
-With the regression test, you'll probably get a gabillion UMR errors,
-and a few MLK errors. I think most of these can be safely suppressed
-by putting the following in your .purify file:
+With the regression test on a fatly configured interpreter
+(i.e. including as many modules as possible in your Modules/Setup
+file), you'll probably get a gabillion UMR errors, and a few MLK
+errors. I think most of these can be safely suppressed by putting the
+following in your .purify file:
suppress umr ...; "socketmodule.c"
suppress umr ...; time_strftime
suppress umr ...; "nismodule.c"
suppress umr ...; "pwdmodule.c"
-This will still leave you (currently) with a few UMR and MLK reports.
-For now, don't worry about them. We'll be evaluating these as time
-goes on, and correcting them as appropriate.
+This will still leave you with just a few UMR, mostly in the readline
+library, which you can safely ignore. A lot of work has gone into
+Python 1.5 to plug as many leaks as possible.
Using Purify or Quantify in this way will give you coarse grained
reports on the whole Python interpreter. You can actually get more
section of code, instead of the whole interpreter. Using this in
conjuction with pdb.py, dbx, or the profiler.py module really gives
you quite a bit of introspective power.
+
+Naturally there are a couple of caveats. This has only been tested
+with Purify 4.0.1 and Quantify 2.1-beta on Solaris 2.5. Purify 4.0.1
+does not work with Solaris 2.6, but Purify 4.1 which reportedly will,
+is currently in beta test. There are funky problems when Purify'ing a
+Python interpreter build with threads. I've had a lot of problems
+getting this to work, so I generally don't build with threads when I'm
+Purify'ing. If you get this to work, let us know!
+
+-Barry Warsaw <bwarsaw@cnri.reston.va.us>
projects / python / commitdiff