Python memory usage

[petercable at gmail.com]

On Oct 21, 5:19 pm, Rolf Wester <rolf.wes... at ilt.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have the problem that with long running Python scripts (many loops)
> memory consumption increases until the script crashes. I used the
> following small script to understand what might happen:
>
<snip>

AFAIK, python uses malloc behind the scenes to allocate memory. From
the malloc man page...

"The  malloc() and free() functions provide a simple, general-purpose
memory allocation package. The malloc() function returns a pointer to
a block of at least size bytes suitably aligned for any use. If the
space assigned by malloc() is overrun, the results are undefined.

The argument to free() is a pointer to a block previously allocated by
malloc(), calloc(), or realloc(). After free() is executed, this space
is made available for further  allocation by the application, though
not returned to the system. Memory is returned to the system only
upon  termination of  the  application.  If ptr is a null pointer, no
action occurs. If a random number is passed to free(), the results are
undefined."

HTH,

Pete