garbage collector and slowdown (guillaume weymeskirch)

[Terry Reedy]

guillaume weymeskirch wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> 
> To test the python 2.5 garbage collector, I wrote a trivial script
> allocating dummy objects of various sizes, then forgetting them in a loop.
> The garbage collector seems working well, limiting the memory used.
> 
> But I've noticed a near linear slowdown of the execution : after a few
> minutes - and several millions of allocated and freed objects, each
> iteration take more and more time to execute.

On a related note, there have been past threads reporting that 
allocating and freeing increasingly long arrays, especially of tuples 
(as I remember) can take more than linearly increasing time. The 
solution was to turn off gc during the allocation phase so it did not 
get triggered and spend increasing long times searching for collectible 
objects when there were not any.