Python thread dumps.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For some time I’ve wanted the equivalent of Java’s ability to dump the stack trace of all currently running threads in Python as a means for debugging some hung processes. I finally found a solution and wired it up to the services’ http console:

import sys
import traceback
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter

def stacktraces():
    code = []
    for threadId, stack in sys._current_frames().items():
        code.append("\n# ThreadID: %s" % threadId)
        for filename, lineno, name, line in traceback.extract_stack(stack):
            code.append('File: "%s", line %d, in %s' % (filename, lineno, name))
            if line:
                code.append("  %s" % (line.strip()))

    return highlight("\n".join(code), PythonLexer(), HtmlFormatter(
      full=False,
      # style="native",
      noclasses=True))

The magic happens with sys._current_frames() which returns exactly what I wanted. The only outstanding issue is how to get the thread’s name to display in addition to the ident.

Debugging on

Python thread dumps.