Debugging memory leaks

[Giorgos Tzampanakis]

On 2013-06-13, dieter wrote:

>> ...  Anyway, my real question is how to go about debugging memory leak
>> problems in Python, particularly for a long running server process
>> written with Twisted. I'm not sure how to use heapy or guppy, and
>> objgraph doesn't tell me enough to locate the problem.
>
> Analysing memory leaks is really difficult: huge amounts of data is
> involved and usually, it is almost impossible to determine which of the
> mentioned objects are leaked and which are rightfully in use.  In
> addition, long running Python processes usually have degrading memory
> use - due to memory fragmentation. There is nothing you can do against
> this.
>
> Therefore: if the leak seems to be small, it may be much more advicable
> to restart your process periodically (during times where a restart does
> not hurt much) rather than try to find (and fix) the leaks. Only when
> the leak is large enough that it would force you to too frequent
> restarts, a deeper analysis may be advicable (large leaks are easier to
> locate as well).


Am I the only one who thinks this is terrible advice?

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