Memory Leaks and Heapy

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Jan 4, 2008 10:34 AM, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven
<asmodai at in-nomine.org> wrote:
> As various people pointed out to me:
> http://wingolog.org/archives/2007/11/27/reducing-the-footprint-of-python-applications

It did; it's what lead me to Heapy.

> Aside from that (rant), I seriously dislike Python's memory management and
> even more the fairly arcane ways people have to go about
> debugging/troubleshooting some 600 MB to 2-3 GB(!) of resident memory use by
> Python.

I agree, but in many cases, the language is powerful enough, that
we're just waiting for the implementation to catch up.

> Personally I consider this the weakest point of Python. Given the fact there
> is a garbage collector this sort of keeping track of memory seems a bit
> contradictory to the concept of garbage collection.

There are examples of how even the best garbage collection can still
miss a few details, mainly because certain objects are holding on to
information they don't actually need, and the documentation for Heapy
even demonstrates an example in Tkinter.

-Yaakov