AWS, Centos, Python and locust.io

I've recently started looking at http://locust.io/ for some distributed load testing. http://gatling-tool.org/ was very tempting, but a python-based framework has some inherent benefits in the current test environment.

At any rate, our AWS hosts are mostly Centos 6.3, which come with the baseline Python 2.6.6

Attempting to use locust.io on these hosts with the system Python 2.6 quickly brought about:
"gc refcount related crash when loading web UI under Python 2.6.6"
https://github.com/locustio/locust/issues/49

Thankfully, getting Python 2.7.3 running as an altinstall was pretty simple and fixed this issue - here's the steps it took (you may also need other Developer related packages...):

yum install readline-devel

yum install libevent

yum install libevent-devel

yum install zlib-devel

yum install bzip2-devel

yum install openssl-devel

yum install ncurses-devel

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2

tar xf Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2 

cd Python-2.7.3

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

make altinstall

easy_install-2.7 pip

pip-2.7 install -U locustio

Voila, no more gc crash when launching locust!