Garbage collection

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    Tom> ...and then I allocate a lot of memory in another process (eg. open
    Tom> a load of files in the GIMP), then the computer swaps the Python
    Tom> process out to disk to free up the necessary space.  Python's
    Tom> memory use is still reported as 953 MB, even though nothing like
    Tom> that amount of space is needed.  From what you said above, the
    Tom> problem is in the underlying C libraries, but is there anything I
    Tom> can do to get that memory back without closing Python?

Not really.  I suspect the unused pages of your Python process are paged
out, but that Python has just what it needs to keep going.  Memory
contention would be a problem if your Python process wanted to keep that
memory active at the same time as you were running GIMP.  I think the
process's resident size is more important here than virtual memory size (as
long as you don't exhaust swap space).

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