Jesper Noehr

Pythonista, RESTafarian, Binary Poet & Proud Bucketeer

Archive for October, 2009

YO PYGMENTS 1.0 I’M REALLY HAPPY FOR YOU, AND IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT PYGMENTS 1.1 HAS ONE OF THE BEST RELEASES OF ALL TIME

with 4 comments

The past couple of weeks, if not months, we’ve been seeing some processes clog up on Bitbucket. Long story short, eventually, some apache2 worker processes would start using a lot of CPU as well as memory, and sit there for a long time. Hours, in fact. This effectively caused those workers to stall, not letting new ones spawn, and over time, that would make the site unreachable and/or slow.

Today, I added some “forensic logging”, which let us trace what URLs those processes were choking on. After we found those, and could reproduce the crazy resource usage, we traced it back to a Pygments highlight. Specifically for the Scala lexer. Apparently that lexer didn’t work all too well.

Upgrading to 1.1 fixed the issue. Things are running much smoother now.

Moral of the story? Keep your software upgraded. It’s not only new features that are being released, also bugfixes.

Written by jespern

October 1st, 2009 at 11:57 am

Posted in python