Debugger times out at “Collecting data…”

Question

I am debugging a Python (3.5) program with PyCharm (PyCharm Community Edition 2016.2.2 ; Build #PC-162.1812.1, built on August 16, 2016 ; JRE: 1.8.0_76-releas

Answer 1

I think that this is caused by some classes having a default method __str__() that is too verbose. Pycharm calls this method to display the local variables when it hits a breakpoint, and it gets stuck while loading the string. A trick I use to overcome this is manually editing the class that is causing the error and substitute the __str__() method for something less verbose.

As an example, it happens for pytorch _TensorBase class (and all tensor classes extending it), and can be solved by editing the pytorch source torch/tensor.py, changing the __str__() method as:

def __str__(self):
        # All strings are unicode in Python 3, while we have to encode unicode
        # strings in Python2. If we can't, let python decide the best
        # characters to replace unicode characters with.
        return str() + ' Use .numpy() to print'
        #if sys.version_info > (3,):
        #    return _tensor_str._str(self)
        #else:
        #    if hasattr(sys.stdout, 'encoding'):
        #        return _tensor_str._str(self).encode(
        #            sys.stdout.encoding or 'UTF-8', 'replace')
        #    else:
        #        return _tensor_str._str(self).encode('UTF-8', 'replace')

Far from optimum, but comes in hand.

UPDATE: The error seems solved in the last PyCharm version (2018.1), at least for the case that was affecting me.