Why does Python “preemptively” hang when trying to calculate a very large number?

Question

I\'ve asked this question before about killing a process that uses too much memory, and I\'ve got most of a solution worked out.

However, there is one problem: calcu

Answer 1

TLDR: Python precomputes constants in the code. If any very large number is calculated with at least one intermediate step, the process will be CPU time limited.

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It took quite a bit of searching, but I have discovered evidence that Python 3 does precompute constant literals that it finds in the code before evaluating anything. One of them is this webpage: A Peephole Optimizer for Python. I've quoted some of it below.

ConstantExpressionEvaluator

This class precomputes a number of constant expressions and stores them in the function's constants list, including obvious binary and unary operations and tuples consisting of just constants. Of particular note is the fact that complex literals are not represented by the compiler as constants but as expressions, so 2+3j appears as

LOAD_CONST n (2) LOAD_CONST m (3j) BINARY_ADD

This class converts those to

LOAD_CONST q (2+3j)

which can result in a fairly large performance boost for code that uses complex constants.

The fact that 2+3j is used as an example very strongly suggests that not only small constants are being precomputed and cached, but also any constant literals in the code. I also found this comment on another Stack Overflow question (Are constant computations cached in Python?):

Note that for Python 3, the peephole optimizer does precompute the 1/3 constant. (CPython specific, of course.) – Mark Dickinson Oct 7 at 19:40

These are supported by the fact that replacing

y = 10**(10**10)

with this also hangs, even though I never call the function!

def f():
    y = 10**(10**10)

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The good news

Luckily for me, I don't have any such giant literal constants in my code. Any computation of such constants will happen later, which can be and is limited by the CPU time limit. I changed

y = 10**(10**10)

to this,

x = 10
print(x)
y = 10**x
print(y)
z = 10**y
print(z)

and got this output, as desired!

-1 -1
10
10000000000
ran out of time!

The moral of the story: Limiting a process by CPU time or memory consumption (or some other method) will work if there is not a large literal constant in the code that Python tries to precompute.