[IronPython] Is this memory leak ?

[Martin Maly]

Unfortunately, this is a known issue that we have on our to-do list.
The code generated by eval is not generated using lightweight codegen and as such it is not garbage collected. As the result, you see the memory effects you are describing.
We will definitely fix this by our 1.0 release, most likely even before Beta and I'll try to find some time to look at this even before then depending on my time.

Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com [mailto:users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com] On Behalf Of Szymon Kobalczyk
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 10:13 AM
To: users at lists.ironpython.com
Subject: [IronPython] Is this memory leak ?

Hi,

We just noticed a serious memory leak in our server application. It happens after we execute some code that uses extensively dynamic scripting with IronPython. After one run the allocation grows from 70MB to more then 500MB.

I've investigated the memory heap using WinDbg and all paths lead to the IronPython.Objects.Frame. All the variables that I passed to the PythonEngine are kept in the dictionary inside these Frames. These Frames in turn are kept in some static object[] array.

In attached project I run in a loop some trivial script using engine Execute method. You can attach to it using WinDbg and check that after the loop completes there are 100 instances of Frame. Here is one sample from the gcroot command:

0:003> !gcroot 00b37918
Note: Roots found on stacks may be false positives. Run "!help gcroot" for more info.
Scan Thread 0 OSTHread 13dc
Scan Thread 2 OSTHread 17fc
DOMAIN(00153570):HANDLE(Pinned):9313e4:Root:01ab4480(System.Object[])->00b37918(IronPython.Objects.Frame)

I also tried this with the evaluate method and the effect was the same.
Only with (my favorite) FastEval option the memory is not allocated. So this could mean this leak occurs during code generation.

I hope this is something that can be fixed quickly as we need to deploy this solution to production.

Note: I still work on .NET Beta 2 and IronPython 0.9.3. I also run the test on the 0.9.4 version but results were the same.

Thanks in Advance,
Szymon Kobalczyk.


PS: I post this mail again cause previously it had to large attachment and was held for approval by moderator.