BadIDChoice RENDER in python 3.3 and tk/tcl displayed on X

Question

I have a fairly complicated GUI written through python's tkinter running on linux, and one of the components (which has a Text widget which updates frequently) causes the GUI to crash infrequently (once a day).

The guis are being displayed to X running on both Mac OSX through X11 and Gnome 2.28.2 with the same behavior. My python version is 3.3 and tk/tcl version is 8.5. The error I get is:

X Error of failed request:  BadIDChoice (invalid resource ID chosen for this connection)
  Major opcode of failed request:  148 (RENDER)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  4 (RenderCreatePicture)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x116517f
  Serial number of failed request:  15106831
  Current serial number in output stream:  15106872

a strace looks like:

11:03:29.632041 recvfrom(13, 0x3bae1d4, 4096, 0, 0, 0) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
11:03:29.632059 recvfrom(13, 0x3bae1d4, 4096, 0, 0, 0) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
11:03:29.632147 poll([{fd=13, events=POLLIN|POLLOUT}], 1, -1) = 1 ([{fd=13, revents=POLLOUT}])
11:03:29.632164 writev(13, [{"\224\4\5\0D\304\361\0\17\274\361\0i\4\0\0\0\0\0\0\224\27\n\0\3\f\340\0\301\v\340\0"..., 5032}, {NULL, 0}, {"", 0}], 3) = 5032
11:03:29.632193 poll([{fd=13, events=POLLIN}], 1, -1) = 1 ([{fd=13, revents=POLLIN}])
11:03:29.637040 recvfrom(13, "\0\16\302\276x\304\361\0\4\0\224\0\1\0\0\0`\16\330\3\1\0\0\0\243\304\342\210\377\177\0\0"..., 4096, 0, NULL, NULL) = 136
11:03:29.637135 open("/usr/share/X11/XErrorDB", O_RDONLY) = 35
11:03:29.637217 fstat(35, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=41532, ...}) = 0
11:03:29.637360 read(35, "!\n! Copyright 1993, 1995, 1998  "..., 41532) = 41532
11:03:29.637387 close(35)               = 0
11:03:29.637820 write(2, "X Error of failed request:  BadI"..., 91) = 91
...

My GUI is single-threaded (and uses the after() call to monitor sockets for I/O).

Does anyone know what might be wrong? Is there any better debugging that I could be doing to figure out what the X Error part means?

Answer 1

Infrequent crashes (once a day) with the following logs...

X Error of failed request:  BadIDChoice (invalid resource ID chosen for this connection)
  Major opcode of failed request:  148 (RENDER)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  4 (RenderCreatePicture)

...appear to be a telltale signature of a known issue within xcb as mentioned in the following thread:

Bug 458092 - Crashes with BadIdChoice X errors

The patch for it is available here.
Based on the git history, this xcb bug should be fixed in libX11-1.1.99.2 and above (~8years ago).

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For further reference here is the email-thread with the complete discussion.