Tracking down memory leaks?

[gene tani]

mensanator at aol.com wrote:
> MKoool wrote:
> > I have an application with one function called "compute", which given a
> > filename, goes through that file and performs various statistical
> > analyses.  It uses arrays extensively and loops alot.  it prints the
> > results of it's statistical significance tests to standard out.  Since
> > the compute function returns and I think no variables of global scope
> > are being used, I would think that when it does, all memory returns
> > back to the operating system.
> >
> > Instead, what I see is that every iteration uses several megs more.
> > For example, python uses 52 megs when starting out, it goes through
> > several iterations and I'm suddenly using more than 500 megs of ram.
> >
> > Does anyone have any pointers on how to figure out what I'm doing
> > wrong?
>
> Are you importing any third party modules? It's not unheard of that
> someone else's code has a memory leak.
>

- sounds like you're working with very large, very sparse matrices,
running LSI/SVD or a PCA/covariance analysis, something like that.  So
it's a specialized problem, you need to specify what libs you're using,
what your platform / O/S is, py release, how you installed it, details
about C estensions, pyrex/psyco/swig, the more info you supply, the
mroe you get back.

- be aware there's wrong ways to measure memory, e.g. this long thread:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-November/310121.html