python memory analysis

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 16:51:09 +0200, Alexander Hoffmann wrote:
> You probably mean to utilize gc.get_objects and build some kind of statics 
> upon it, don't you ? 
> Ok, so this means there is indeed no tool which will help me with that ?  :-(
> 
> -alex

So far, every time I've had a memory leak in Python, simply running the
process until it leaks for a while, then looking at gc.get_objects(), has
made it immediately clear what was being leaked. (Regretfully, I have
never been able to isolate a test case for any of these leaks.) You
usually see a bajillion instances of some class and that has always been
enough of a clue.

Due to how Python works, I'm not sure it is even possible to create a tool
that does any better than that. It is meaningful to talk about a C
function that "leaks memory" by allocating and never deallocating, but it
is much trickier to assign "blame" in Python in a way that could ever have
meaning to a tool. If the object is left lying around it is already
because the computer believes somebody has a reference to it; how is the
computer to "know" this reference isn't "real"? (Assuming no bugs in
Python of course, but even so you're left with the same problem.)