Shared memory not working properly at all?

OK, this worries me a lot: after reading the documentation for shared memory: multiprocessing.shared_memory — Shared memory for direct access across processes — Python 3.11.1 documentation
I had been planning how to implement software for fast data exchange between processes controlling a robot. Sharing numpy arrays between those processes looked like the ideal way to do this.

However, by chance I stumbled over this bug before I even started to write the first line of code:
resource tracker destroys shared memory segments when other processes should still have valid access · Issue #82300 · python/cpython · GitHub and the impact of this bug looks terrible!
How can it be that while this bug has existed for 4 major versions it does not even get mentioned in the docs?

I made a quick test:

  • process A creates a shared memory and keeps running
  • process B accesses the memory, does something and closes it, but does not unlink, then exits
  • process C tries to access memory: not around any more, because it got cleaned up against my will when process B exited

This bug is so bad that it basically makes using shared memory on Linux impossible, in my opinion? Why is this not mentioned in the documentaiton? Is there a good way to work around this (which does not involve compiling a modified version of Python myself)?

I have to say I am truly shocked about that.

UPDATE: ok it seems there is a patch - I tested it and it seems to work. Beyond me why this is not getting mentioned in the documentation or even implemented as the default behaviour after all this time.
https://bugs.python.org/file49859/mprt_monkeypatch.py

It probably isn’t easy to fix without a special multiprocessing aware
manager of some kind.

Had you considered just dumping the data into a file and using the
mmap module to map the file read/write? Should work just as well.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson cs@cskk.id.au

As I write in the update there is a monkey patch that works for me, though I find it quite remarkable that something as significant as this not getting mentioned in the docs and still not being fixed.
Managed shared memory exists in the form as managed shared variables, but is a completely different topic altogether and specifically not what I need.
Using mmap is perhaps an option, as far as I can see the implementation of shared_memory actually does it exactly that way.