Executive Summary General Protection Faults (GPFs) in ZeroMQ-powered applications can bring production systems to a halt due to unsafe memory access. These faults are especially common in multi-threaded Python environments where improper socket sharing and context management occur. This article walks through a real-world scenario from a distributed camera processing system, showcasing how adopting thread-safe ZeroMQ practices completely resolved repeated crashes. The Problem: Understanding General Protection Faults What Is a General Protection Fault? A GPF is a critical error that occurs when a program accesses protected or invalid areas of memory. In the context of ZeroMQ: python3 general protection fault ip:7847bbbf4660 sp:7847fbffc830 error:0 in libzmq-56587b1b.so This log indicates: Process: Python3 Cause: Illegal memory access inside the libzmq shared library Result: Hard crash — the Python process is forcefully terminated Why