TwistedElephant: A Memory Debugger for Twisted Applications
Recently, I was trying to figure out why a Twisted application was leaking memory at a disturbingly rapid rate. In the process of investigation, I hacked up some one-off bits of logging within the target application that used Python’s GC module and my di() hack such that I could explore the active object graph within the Twisted process.
Knowing that I would be faced with this problem again, I did a bit of recreational hacking over Memorial Day and created a primitive, though effective, general purpose Twisted memory debugging tool.
It is called TwistedElephant.
It lives in my personal SVN repository at red-bean:
http://svn.red-bean.com/bbum/trunk/hacques/TwistedElephant/
It includes some quick documentation.
Note that it is a complete hack that was just good enough to solve a set of memory debugging problems that I had at the time. There are dozens of improvements that can be made and likely some great bugs, too.
Patches welcome!