Wierd behavior of gc.collect

[Bodhi]

I know this, but my question is what does gc.collect do which results in the c library to free memory? Usually it is because of unreferenced objects in a cycle or something, but here that doesn't seem to be the case.

On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 9:32:27 PM UTC+5:30, Dave Angel wrote:
> On 03/19/2013 11:47 AM, Bodhi wrote:
> 
> > I have a python process that does some operations and is supposed to release memory after those. The issue is that memory is not released (as seen through top). So I do a gc.collect() to see if there is any cycle etc. Immediately after doing the collect memory usage drops as expected, but strangely gc.collect() returns 0.
> 
> > This means I cannot find out what the problem is by setting the debug option on gc which is what I usually do to figure out issues like this.
> 
> >
> 
> > Maybe its that my understanding about it is incorrect, but if gc.collect returned 0, how come some memory was freed?
> 
> >
> 
> 
> 
> To put it simply, top won't in general show you that things are freed. 
> 
> The C libraries for malloc and free will reuse the memory, but not 
> 
> usually release it to the operating system.  So it's not usually going 
> 
> to show up in 'top.'
> 
> 
> 
> There was a long thread on this quite recently, but I can't seem to find 
> 
> it right now.
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> DaveA