Introduction

This package consists of a library and command line tool. The library allows you to dump the Python objects in memory to a dump file.

The command line tool is used to examine the dump file contents.

Creating a dump file.

To add memory dump capability to one of your Python applications, import the caulk library and register a signal handler.

import caulk

caulk.handler()

A number of kwargs can control the operation of the signal handler.

• signum - The signal to react to, signal.SIGUSR1 by default.

• path - The path to which to write the dump file /var/tmp by default.

• name - The name of the dump file, ‘caulk’ by default..

A dump file’s name will be: ‘{0}-{1}-{2}.dump’.format(name, pid, time).

To generate a dump file, use kill:

# kill -usr1 <pid>

Where <pid> is the pid of your running application.

You can also use the low-level API to generate a dump file directly instead of relying on a signal handler.

import caulk

caulk.dump('/var/tmp/my.dump')

Examining a dump file.

To examine the dump file, use the caulk command.

# caulk --classes /var/tmp/caulk-1025-1346255743.435316.dump
count total  average min/max   class
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4     256    64      64/64     unittest.suite.TestSuite
1     64     64      64/64     unittest.runner._WritelnDecorator
1     64     64      64/64     site._Helper
...

For more information on using the caulk command, see it’s help.

# caulk --help