question about Pythonwin and memory

[Neil Hodgson]

Prateep Siamwalla:
> The interactive shell in windows (Pythonwin or IDLE) is great for trying
> things/ideas out.  I usually write code/scripts in one window and then
> switch over to the interactive shell to poke around with the object I have
> created.  On some occasions, either by intention or by accident, I have
> gotten the shell to print out lots and lots of text ( something like "for
i
> in big_list: print i"....woops!!) Anyways, after such a command is run, I
> notice the environment slows down drastically.  Is there a way of clearing
> some memory/buffer/whatever to get it back up to speed again?  (other than
> stopping and restarting Pythonwin of course)

   There are several things which can be causing the slowness. I will talk
about PythonWin although some of this may be useful for IDLE.

   * Using up a lot of memory to hold the text in the interactive window.
Difficult to fix as deleting the current text will save it in the undo
buffer. Restarting PythonWin is the easy solution. It would be fairly easy
to add a command that would delete all the text and the undo buffer.

   * There are very wide (thousands of characters) lines in the interactive
window. This can be fixed by deleting the text of the interactive window
with the key sequence:
Ctrl+A Delete

   * There is a bunch of memory in use because of some variables you have
defined interactively. If you know the variable, then use the del statement
to remove it.

   * PythonWin is having a problem with colourising the text. Delete the
contents of the interactive window.

   Neil