Question

I have a python script to allocate a huge memory space and eventually ended up overflow. Is there anyway nosetests can peacefully handle this?

Answer 1

Unfortunately the only way to survive such a thing would be to have your test fixture run that particular test in a subcommand using subprocess.Popen(), and capture its output and error code so that you can see the nonzero error code and “out of memory” traceback that result. Note that sys.executable is the full path to the current Python executable, if that helps you build a Popen() command line to run Python on the little test script that runs out of memory.

Once a process it out of memory, there is typically no way to recover, because nearly anything it might try to do — format a string to print out, for example — takes even more memory which is, by definition, now exhausted. 🙂