python memory analysis

[Alexander Hoffmann]

Hello Jeremy,
Thanks for your help ! 

Indeed a first invocation of gc.get_objects already gave me an idea about what 
might go wrong. It seems like the garbage collector does not remove objects a 
and b if a references b even though no one else references either a or b.

I will continue my analysis. 

Thanks,
Alex

On Monday 06 September 2004 17:38, Jeremy Bowers wrote:
> 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.)