releasing memory to malloc

[MrJean1]

The memory manager in the latest Python release 2.5 does return freed
memory to the underlying system, if possible. For more details, see the
5th bullet on this page

  <http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/ports.html>.

/Jean Brouwers



iker.arizmendi at gmail.com wrote:
> The workaround I went with made use of the shelve module and
> calls to gc.collect() to cap the memory consumed by the Python
> allocator. It was a bit intrusive but it got the job done.
>
> Would a method in the gc module that released memory to malloc
> be something that could get added to Python? Or are there some
> reasons why allowing that would be a bad idea?
>
> Regards,
> Iker
>
> P.S.
> This may be a repeat of an earlier message - it seems that
> google groups may have discarded my earlier post.
>
>
> iker.arizmendi at gmail.com wrote:
> > Is there any way to get Python to release memory back to the
> > C allocator? I'm currently running a script that goes through
> > the following steps:
> >
> > 1) Creates a very large number of Python objects to produce
> > a relatively small data structure that sits in a C extension.
> > The Python objects consume quite a bit of memory.
> >
> > 2) Releases all the Python objects.
> >
> > 3) Invokes a function of said C extension for further
> > processing. This step needs as much memory as possible.
> >
> > I'd like step 2 to return memory to the C allocator so that it
> > is available to the extension in step 3 (which uses malloc).
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Iker Arizmendi