@Tim Peters
For example,
the following should reproduce the error:
many_arguments = [[1,2] for i in range(50)]
for term in product(*many_arguments):
    print(term)
In my application, I was taking the Cartesian product of the sets of all simple path to several nodes. This regularly produced a lot of arguments and crashed the compute nodes on which my jobs were running. Perhaps, this is not a salient concern for most uses, but I just wanted to make you aware of the issue.