[Python-Dev] Investigating Python memory footprint of one real Web application

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2017 10:21:45 -0800
Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> The thing I found most surprising about that blog post was that contrary to
> common wisdom, refcnt updates per se had essentially no effect on the
> amount of memory shared between CoW processes, and the problems were all
> due to the cycle collector.

Indeed, it was unexpected, though it can be explained easily: refcount
updates touch only the live working set, while GC passes scan through
all existing objects, even those that are never actually used.

Regards

Antoine.