mmap caching

George Sakkis george.sakkis at gmail.com
Sun Jan 21 03:20:40 EST 2007


I've been trying to track down a memory leak (which I initially
attributed erroneously to numpy) and it turns out to be caused by a
memory mapped file. It seems that mmap caches without limit the chunks
it reads, as the memory usage grows to several hundreds MBs according
to the Windows task manager before it dies with a MemoryError. I'm
positive that these chunks are not referenced anywhere else; in fact if
I change the mmap object to a normal file, memory usage remains
constant. The documentation of mmap doesn't mention anything about
this. Can the caching strategy be modified at the user level ?

George




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