[Baypiggies] What garbage!

[Aahz]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007, Dennis Reinhardt wrote:
> At 02:21 PM 2/15/2007, Chad Netzer wrote:
>> 
>>Dennis, you said in your example, "The final time.sleep(2000) is to
>>allow time for garbage collection to reduce memory usage."  However,
>>that certainly will have no effect with CPython, nor do operating
>>system memory allocators work that way.
> 
> I read at http://docs.python.org/lib/module-gc.html where it says
> 
>          "tune the collection frequency"
> 
> and other statements on this page to mean that the garbage collector makes 
> periodic sweeps of object references.  I do not see what the timing is.  I 
> did provide for a window in this code so that if such a sweep resulted in 
> lowering memory requirements, I had provided for time to go by.

Generally speaking, GC runs depend on object allocation/de-allocation,
not clock time.  GC will run when X number of objects have been created
without deallocating them.  (There are some subtleties involved, but
that's the essence.)  As Chad pointed out, this is separate from Python's
regular refcount mechanism.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"I disrespectfully agree."  --SJM