A "crashed" thread does not terminate the Python interpreter, so the executor here will stay alive. If you want an abnormal thread exit to result in an executor termination, you will have to implement that behavior explicitly. We use a thread liveness detector that looks something like: https://gist.github.com/wickman/dc11896d782f9a2160b8
When you create a thread, you do registry.register(thread). That thread should call registry.unregister(self) prior to terminating normally. If it terminates abnormally, the registry.dead event will be set. Our MainThread in practice just does something like: while registry.dead.wait(timeout=10): pass We also have a library (twitter.common.exceptions on pypi) that provides a class called ExceptionalThread which guarantees that sys.excepthook() is called. You could implement similar behavior by making all threads ExceptionalThreads and wrapping sys.excepthook with something that provides an event to MainThread to signal termination as described above. ~brian On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Alex Rukletsov <a...@mesosphere.io> wrote: > While playing with Rendler <https://github.com/mesosphere/RENDLER> I > noticed that if the task (read: python executor) crashes, the underlying > executor stays alive and therefore is not reaped, which renders the task > running indefinitely. Here > <https://gist.github.com/rukletsov/4a74743c5b67f304e661> is a part of the > slave log (exception itself doesn't matter, it's there to test the > behaviour). Not sure, whether it's a bug or a feature, for me it looks like > a bug. > > Regards, > Alex >