releasing memory to malloc

[iker.arizmendi at gmail.com]

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