garbage collector

[franck delarue]

hi,
I use python1 with a lot of object (dictionnairies +
lists) and my program takes 3 or 4 hours to execute on
a 4 processors (700 mghz) and 2 Go Ram machine (linux
red hat).
The problem is that when the program is finished,
python still continues to delete the objects (I've put
some "print" to see when the "del" function is
executed) during about 30 minutes.
Is that normal ? Is there a solution to stop the
program correctly ? ("ctrl+alt+del" or "kill -9 XXX"
works but i don't feel satisfied) 


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