[Python-Dev] Memory leak tracking
Greg Stein
gstein@lyra.org
Wed, 12 Jul 2000 01:37:53 -0700
On Wed, Jul 12, 2000 at 01:05:52AM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>...
> I suspect this is exactly what's happening. I'd have to spend more
> time to know exactly what's happening, but this jives with the
> observed behavior. If so, the only thing we could do is try to break
> the cycles manually at shutdown time and have the normal decrefs free
> all the memory.
>
> I'm not sure it's worth the effort. 1) it isn't much memory; 2) it
> only leaks when gc is disabled; 3) it's a one time cost, not
> e.g. a leak every time you spawn a thread.
>
> That last is interesting, because I believe at least on Solaris, there
> /is/ a leak for each new thread, but I haven't had time to find it
> yet. That one's worth tracking down. For the others, it's actually
> quite nice to see gc doing it's job!
>
> Other than that, running the test suite, the current CVS seems to have
> a very clean bill of health memory usage-wise.
Please try to consider the embedded case, too. If Python interpreters are
created/destroyed, or modules are loaded/thrown out, or whatever... are
there leaks? Any leak can be a disaster in embedded cases.
Now... no need to be defensive :-) ... just pointing out there is another
consideration when thinking about leaks.
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/