how to explain this memory usage

[Alex Martelli]

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in message
news:MzVF6.17308$qc2.5605564 at typhoon.southeast.rr.com...
    [snip]
> In other words, the memory allocated to a process running a Python program
> moves upwards from the current high-water mark, never downwards.

Sure does on Windows NT (and, others have reported, Linux).

> It's actually quite unusual for programs to give back memory to the OS in
> any case, except the special one of "I've finished, you can have it ALL".

This definitely used to be the case, but my impression is that
things have become quite a bit better (mostly at the C-runtime
library levels).


Alex