Reference counts

[Martin von Loewis]

Helen Dawson <helend at accessone.com> writes:

> I understand that the objects for numbers from 0 to 100 are shared,
> but I find it unlikely that there are actually 1495 references to zero,
> and 70 to 15. Zero is a popular number, but 1495? These results
> are typical for absolutely nothing happening in Python

Others have already guessed that you must have used some large
application, e.g. Pythonwin. Note that every occurrence of 0 in a
python module that has been imported will add to the reference count.

If you want to track all the references, I recommend the patch

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=402925&group_id=5470&atid=305470

There, you'd do

print gc.getreferents(0)

That works for Python 2.x only, of course.

Regards,
Martin